When our founder, Stephen Edwards, set out to design TheraPlan, he didn’t have all the answers. In fact, he had nothing but questions: All the questions that therapists, therapy clinic owners, and his own billing agency staff had come up with throughout the years while using other therapy EMRs.
Why can’t an EMR make it faster to document my daily progress notes and evaluations?
Can using an EMR allow me to cut down on how often I have to communicate with admins?
How come I can’t track authorizations inside my EMR?
Why am I spending so much time clearing up confusion about payroll?
When will there be an EMR with truly helpful technical support?
Do I have to be a coding expert to understand which CPT codes I need to use?
Can an EMR be just as effective for community-based therapists?
Starting with questions like these turned out to be the critical factor in building a valuable software application for the therapy community. Inherent in these questions, Steve heard a need for an intuitive system that wouldn’t just provide a place to house documents or keep track of patients’ demographic details. The solution was going to be a full-service resource for therapy practices.
Yet, he didn’t have all the answers.
Even with 25 years of healthcare administration and therapy billing experience, Steve knew that he needed to look beyond his own ideas to build what the therapy community truly needed.
That’s why he consulted with therapists working in various disciplines: speech, occupational, physical, ABA, and EI, to build all the elements of our software. He didn’t just ask “What do you need?”, but also “What do you want an EMR to look like and feel like?”
These therapists became our sounding board, a panel of experts who provided us with ongoing feedback as we developed our
audit-guided documentation templates,
goal transfer process for evaluations and plans of care,
appointment management functions,
and more.
Long hours of research, discussion, and investigation resulted in many of the answers we sought. From these, we derived our application’s mobile responsiveness, dashboard and accordion technology, calendar interface, and more. Questions remain, though, which is the exciting part of developing an EMR. There is always more to learn!
We continue to grow with each new software release, but more importantly, with each question or concern that comes through to our support desk. We never assume that we’re done learning about what therapists really want and need.
We know that your job can look different every day. Our goal is to exercise the same flexibility that’s required of you, so that we stay agile and serve you best.
Since day one, TheraPlan has evolved based on the experiences of real therapists. This process will continue. When you become a TheraPlan user, you join our panel of advisers. Every question you present to us will be added to our archive of round table topics for future development.
Check out more about our story here.
