Item: WebPT
Rating: 1
Author: Wren Sweeney

Overall Satisfaction with WebPT

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used WebPT as our EMR system. We also used WebPT's billing services as well. We are a small physical therapy office, and the software was meant to help us manage our patients, fax updates to their doctors, submit billing to insurance companies, and to follow up on claims as they cleared or denied. Over roughly 12 years of use, the quality of the EMR remained fine, but the quality of the billing services decreased so sharply that we had no choice but to switch services.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Thorough and secure medical records
Learning curve on documentation, but mostly provider-friendly
Claims sent quickly

Cons

In my opinion, little to no customer service
In my experience, billing team can take upward of 2 months to reply to questions
ERAs often applied incorrectly
In my opinion it's VERY expensive

Return on Investment

In my experience, lost thousands of dollars on claims that WebPT mishandled
In my experience, increased front office hours as we had to tell WebPT staff how to read EOBs correctly, ask them to fix mistakes they had made
Accurately tracked Medicare accumulations

Alternatives Considered

Jane

Jane has been a MARKED improvement for us from WebPT. We were able to customize it to our liking, they offer online scheduling within the software, and billing couldn't be simpler or easier to use. I have been able to handle claims with ease and have had little to no issue with getting paid promptly and accurately. I have been counting down the days to the end of our "cool down period" with WebPT because I cannot WAIT to be rid of them.

Key Insights

Do you think WebPT delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with WebPT's feature set?

Did WebPT live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of WebPT go as expected?

Would you buy WebPT again?

Other Software Used

Jane

Likelihood to Recommend

WebPT would probably be great for a large, high-volume clinic where therapists are seeing such a high volume of patients that billing mistakes/delays don't have as big of an impact on the bottom line. A clinic with a dedicated billing team would also probably do well with WebPT. For a small, independently-owned clinic with 3-5 therapists and 2 full time front office staff who also are managing scheduling and other clinic duties, in my opinion, WebPT is not a good system: they make too many mistakes, response time is too slow, and the clinic does not have the permissions to correct mistakes themselves.

WebPT Feature Ratings

Using WebPT

Users and Roles

8 - Three of these people are front office staff, who are responsible for scheduling, inputting new patient information, updating insurance information, uploading eDocs, and checking to make sure faxes have been sent successfully. (One of those three is me, who also manages the billing side of WebPT in addition to all of the above.) Five are physical therapists, who are responsible for documentation on their patients' cases and looking at the Lost Patient Log to see who has fallen of their schedule.

Support Headcount Required

2 - My business partner (who is a physical therapist) and I were the go-to people for support with WebPT. My business partner was largely responsible for managing the subscription and training therapists on how to use WebPT for documentation. I was largely responsible for training the front office on using WebPT, staying on top of new/developing features, and managing WebPT billing.

Business Processes Supported

Documentation
Insurance billing
Faxing evals/progress notes/discharges
Collecting patient balances

Innovative Uses

None - we used it as it was intended.
WebPT is a very rigid software and does not allow for "off-label" use

Future Planned Uses

None
We are glad to be rid of it

Likelihood to Renew

In my opinion, the service we received for the price we paid was not justified: I spent as much time fixing WebPT's errors as I did trying to do my own job. In my experience, there are accounts that they wrote off without telling us rather than figuring out how to resubmit corrected claims, we were unable to send them paper insurance checks for over a year despite multiple attempts to connect with customer service, and WebPT began crashing regularly within the last month of using it.

Evaluating WebPT and Competitors

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Ease of Use
Other

At the time that we purchased WebPT in 2012, it was the premiere product on the market for physical therapy EMR and billing. The other options available were either less functional or less specific to physical therapy. In the intervening years, however, better and less expensive products have entered the market, so after many years of frustration with declining service, we switched software.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

Again, I feel we made the best and most comprehensive decision we could have at the time for our practice. There is something to be said for a product that is specific to one's niche in the industry. That said, I feel we clearly became less of a priority to WebPT over the years as they focused on more on buying other software companies and less on providing service to their customers. Had I known about our current system, Jane, any earlier than I did, we likely would have switched years ago.

WebPT Training

Training Types Used

Online Training
No Training

In-Person Training

Online Training

In my opinion, the online WebPT info base is a mess: articles are not grouped in a way that makes sense, and while this may have changed, there was no quick-start guide for new therapists. I ended up writing tutorials for our front office and therapists on my own time to get everyone up to speed.

Ease of WebPT Training

Without training, in my opinion, WebPT is impossible to use. I feel it's intimidating and the interface is not user friendly at first glance. Through repetition, system use becomes relatively easy and even user-friendly, but there is no "demo mode" so training has to happen on the fly. In my opinion, WebPT Billing is incredibly arcane and user-unfriendly, and without guidance I could have never learned how to use it.

WebPT Support

Support Rating

In my opinion, support is terrible. The chat support works only sometimes, and that support is the most helpful. When you call, in my experience, it is impossible to get a live person and they seldom return messages. On the rare chance that you do talk to a live person, they can help you about 50% of the time. And if you need help with WebPT Billing, best of luck - I had tasks for my billing team that went unanswered for 2-3 months or longer.

WebPT Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
None	Slow Resolution Poor followup Less knowledgeable Problems left unsolved Not kept informed Escalation required Difficult to get immediate help Need to explain problems multiple times Support doesn't seem to care Slow Initial Response

Premium Support

I don't know if premium support was an option for WebPT, so I don't believe we had it. If it was a product that was offered, it wasn't offered to us. Even if it had been offered, I would have been reluctant to purchase it, as we were already spending so much money on WebPT that it would've felt like a slap in the face to pay even more.

Bug Resolution

Yes - About half the time, the bug was resolved to our satisfaction and in a timely fashion. The other half, in my experience, we just had to limp along until someone did something. In my experience, there was an entire day of outages a few months ago that was so bad that WebPT ended up refunding us and other customers for that lost day.

Exceptional Examples of WebPT Support

I wish I could, but all of my experiences with WebPT support have been deeply frustrating and disheartening. I want to be clear that this is not the fault of the customer support employees, who were always as helpful as they could be, but, in my opinion, the fault of the parent company who either offered them insufficient training or insufficient staffing (so there weren't enough support employees to go around).

Using WebPT

Usability

The EMR has a learning curve, but once you get used to it, it's fairly user-friendly: notes are easy to duplicate, information is thorough and useful. In my opinion, WebPT Billing is arcane and difficult to use, and offers no opportunity for the business to correct or edit any payments entered incorrectly by WebPT.