Automated waitlist filled hundreds of cancellations each week.
Origin Physical Therapy partnered with Penciled to bring automated waitlists to the enterprise.
Overview
Origin Physical Therapy, a premier women's health brand with 137 providers nationwide, filled 366% more cancellations within the first week of deploying Penciled.
High-impact features
- Customizable priority groups for urgent patients
- Customizable expiration windows for offers of cancellation openings
- Allowing patients to adjust their own waitlist availability via SMS
About the team
Origin Physical Therapy is the nation's premier provider of pelvic floor physical therapy. The Origin team is 137 clinicians strong, practicing in 19 physical locations and online across the country. To deliver exceptional experiences at this scale, Origin has a centralized operations team with support staff globally and an in-house engineering team. Penciled worked directly with front office staff (including in-person at their SF office), operations leaders, software engineers, and support staff to successfully implement an automated waitlist solution for all locations.
Core problem
In a competitive space like physical therapy, Origin stands out with command over their specialty: pelvic floor physical therapy. In fact, demand was so high for their services that many locations had hundreds of patients waiting on a waitlist at any given time.
As a result, front office at high-demand locations were employing various strategies to keep track of waitlist patients and reach out to them when a cancellation occurred.
To keep track of waitlist patients, some front office staff were using blocks in a dedicated calendar within their EMR to indicate when certain patients were available. Others were using a spreadsheet.
When a cancellation occurred during the day, the front office would identify which waitlist patients to contact and reach out to those patients manually. This was an extremely tedious process, costing hundreds of hours per month.
Why they chose Penciled
At the time, Penciled's AI waitlist was filling hundreds of cancellations per month for physical therapy clinics. The Penciled sytem, which front offices used to store waitlists, automatically reached out to patients who were eligible for a given slot whenever a cancellation occurred. Penciled automatically scheduled the first patient who replied "yes" to the offer without front office supervision. After demoing, the Origin team was ready to give it a go.
Product
The Penciled product was uniquely positioned to assist high volume physical therapy clinics with waitlists. It had already been proven in 5-location, 30 provider settings, and it was ready to scale to enterprise.
Penciled dashboard for front office monitoring
Penciled featured a dashboard which allowed front offices to keep track of ongoing waitlist offerings which tracked appointments immediately after they were cancelled in the ongoing waitlist run queue.
Penciled also allowed the front office to inspect previous cancellations and look into which patients were contacted and which patient accepted the apopintment.
By clicking into the patient, the front office could quickly read the text message thread and even send messages manually to override the AI system if needed.
Patient text message conversation with Penciled
By using generative AI-powered SMS, patients could easily reply to the AI assistant and schedule appointments without any portals, logins, or other steps.
Rollout
Origin first deployed Penciled to two locations with varying patient demographics: San Francisco, CA and Round Rock, Texas. Within the first week, Penciled performed beyond the front office. Origin quickly expanded Penciled's deployment to all of their physical locations.
Results
It took 8 weeks to roll out Penciled's AI waitlist product across the entire organization. There was not a single week in which Penciled's AI waitlist did not outperform the previous front office baseline.
Cancellations filled
The graph below represents the number of cancellations which were successfully filled by Penciled, week over week.
The front office baseline was calculated using historical data of the number of cancellations filled on average across front offices in a given week. Increases in the baseline over time represent the rollout of Penciled to more clinic locations. For example, in week 8, the front office baseline was 9 times higher than week 1 because Penciled was live in 18 Origin front offices in week 8 versus 2 front offices in week 1.
Penciled volumes remained stable in the months following week 8.
At Origin's request, the actual volumes of appointments have been redacted.
Percent improvement
Similarly, the graph below shows the percent improvement of cancellations filled using Penciled versus the previous front office baseline. It is based on the same data as the cancellations filled graph above. Even though appointments booked by Penciled remained stable, percent improvement decreases over time because additional clinics onboarded without significant waitlists.
Discussion
Penciled's impact
Penciled dramatically outperformed the front office baseline in Origin locations where waitlists were incredibly long, which were the first locations that Origin chose to deploy Penciled. For clinics with fewer patients on the waitlist, the impact of Penciled's AI waitlist feature was less significant.
"The Penciled platform and team have been instrumental in our clinic's success. Prior to the platform, our admin teams were manually texting every patient on the waitlist with last minute openings. With the help of the Penciled team, we setup the platform to cater to our clinic's needs. Our utilization drastically increased, and our patients were excited to snag last minute openings when they were only expecting their next appointment to be months out. We're very impressed with the capabilities and can't wait to see what new features they will come up with next!"
Return on investment
Throughout this engagement it became clear that Penciled's return on investment was incredibly clear. While actual revenue numbers were not shared, Penciled estimates a 1:100 cost to return ratio based on the volumes of appointments booked.
Limitations and ROI potential beyond appointments booked
Time saved was not closely investigated in this case study. In order to book these appointments, Penciled's AI processed thousands of inbound and outbound messages per week. If handled manually, each of these messages would have presumably taken front office time to read, reply, and perform necessary actions in the EMR as needed. Penciled's AI also handled a number of other inbound requests from patients such as requests to update their waitlist availability or view upcoming scheduled appointments, which were tasks additionally offloaded from the front office onto the AI.
It was not closely reviewed whether Penciled's AI waitlist resulted in a reduction in inbound call volume or talk time or whether Penciled's waitlist automation enabled front office to perform additional work with the extra bandwidth.
Additionally, it was not reviewed how Penciled's AI waitlist impacted patient satisfaction, total revenue generated per patient, or net promoter score per patient.
Conclusion
Physical therapy clinics with existing waitlist processes can save time and recapture revenue at scale by utilizing Penciled's AI waitlist feature. Combined with Penciled's latest AI plan of care scheduling, two-way AI reminders with confirmations and automatic cancellations, and Penciled's automated AI waitlist, physical therapy clinics can free up staff resources to expand business operations. Penciled's AI waitlist is optimal for clinics with coveted last-minute cancellation slots that are in high demand from patients in need. It has simply not been previously possible to engage in hundreds of conversations over SMS in parallel with patients and automatically schedule those visits into the EMR to fill cancellations at the last minute. The extra revenue generated by recapturing previously unfilled cancellations can create surplus resources that can be leveraged towards additional growth of the business.
Disclaimer
Origin Physical Therapy is not currently a customer.
