6-Minute Patient Evals the Norm at Physical Therapy Clinic Thanks to Net Health Innovations

The Challenge

Like all private practice physical therapy clinic owners, Leigh Langerwerf, PT, DPT, is obsessed with efficiency, especially when it comes to medical records documentation.

The founder and owner of Butte Premier Physical Therapy in Chico, CA, which opened in 2007, Langerwerf sees such efficiencies as his ticket to not only provide top-notch patient care within his rural community, but to also maintain a healthy work-life balance that allows him and his staff to pursue other personal and professional passions.

For Langerwerf specifically, one of these passions is promoting educational and growth opportunities for the next generation of physical therapists.

Over the years, he has made an intentional effort to grow Butte Premier Physical Therapy into a leading teaching clinic for students working toward their DPT degrees, providing them with hands-on learning opportunities during the final years of their education.

One day, in fact, Langerwerf hopes to pursue teaching himself. He also has plans to start a nonprofit orthopedic residency program in Northern California to help area clinics better recruit young talent.

“The ‘why’ behind what I do is to provide the best care possible for our patients,” Langerwerf said. “Just because we live in a rural area doesn’t mean that our patients deserve any less. And, being efficient in how we do things, especially in our documentation, allows us to focus more on our patients – and for our interns, on gaining hands-on experience – while maintaining a good work-life balance.”

The Solution

In an effort to optimize productivity, Langerwerf has long utilized Net Health Therapy for Clinics – formerly Casamba – as his practice’s EMR.

More specifically, he and his team have made full use of several features, enhancements and tools that, through the years, were created and added to Net Health Therapy for Clinics to specifically make documentation considerably quicker and more seamless for rehab therapists.

These features and tools include:

• Customizable, specialized documentation workflows and templates
• Clinical knowledgebase with searchable library of documentation phrases Langerwerf and his clinicians can add to notes with just a single click
• History import, allowing Butte Premier clinicians to view and import previous documentation into current notes
• Customizable text shortcuts that enable clinicians to insert commonly used phrases and paragraphs by typing just a few letters
• Documentation guardrails and alerts for such things as “stale” documentation and incorrect patient information

Applications designed to seamlessly integrate with Net Health Therapy for Clinics also helps boost efficiencies at Butte Premier Physical Therapy. Tools such as Kno2, an e-faxing and direct messaging app, makes it possible to complete referral management paperwork and communications in seconds, not minutes, Langerwerf said.

“The two biggest things I would say that have changed things completely since we became web-based is the templates and text replacement,” he added. “The templates have become so much more refined that I can now make them for the entire corporation. My interns can use them and everything. And with the replacement text, when I can just type ‘@mailmod,’ and it pulls up an entire paragraph in my assessment with all the complexity sentences and everything else … I mean, that’s phenomenal.”

The Results