NMA Processes 157% More Referrals with Tennr
Getting patients the care they need faster, while growing their practice
The Challenge
A Never-Ending Referral Backlog
Before finding Tennr, NMA was spending up to ten minutes manually processing each referral, inevitably resulting in a backlog. At any given time, each team member had 65 to 70 cases sitting in their inboxes, waiting to be entered. To make matters worse, each email typically contained six to eight patients, each with unique processing requirements. In their rush to get through referrals as quickly as possible, NMA's team was frequently making data entry errors.
“The processes we had in place were not going to be able to keep up with the scale that we continued adding” said Nick Luekenga, CEO and Founder of NMA.
Not only was this bad for morale, it threatened the relationships NMA had with surgeons. The longer they took to process referrals, the more likely it was that referrals would be sent elsewhere.
As referral processing drained valuable time and resources and challenged customer relationships, Nick and his team were looking for ways to scalably grow the business. NMA needed to find a solution that their team would love working with, that could effortlessly boost their productivity. Most importantly, he needed a way to automate the most cumbersome processes like classifying documents and extracting information from faxes and messy handwritten sources that were essential for his billing team.
Life With Tennr
From Backlogged to Fast-Tracked Referrals
Tennr’s implementation within NMA’s systems was seamless and fully configurable to the intricacies of the team’s existing processes, allowing NMA to maintain its workflows and tools without the burden of any migrations. Implementing Tennr was also efficient, delivering measurable value to NMA within days.
Increasing Productivity
Before Tennr, NMA was processing 15 to 20 referrals per day, per person. After implementing Tennr, each team member typically handles well over 60 referrals per day and is able to eliminate their daily backlog without any manual errors.
Today 75% of cases at NMA are processed with Tennr and their days sales overdue (DSO) or the average time between care and payment has dropped by 30% due to the speed and efficiency that they can automate the document and information flow for patients.
More Time for Other Tasks
The team’s referral processing time is now a fraction of what it used to be and the number of team members they have working on documents is ⅓ what it was before. As a result, they’ve been able to maximize the time they can dedicate to other areas of the practice.
“We moved members out of our scheduling team and reduced the size to 1/3 of what it once was and they’ve been freed up to focus on customer experience activities — creating a really positive experience with stakeholders whether they’re customers, referral sources, or patients” — Nick Luekenga
More Referrals, More Revenue
Closing the referral loop quickly and without errors has had a direct impact on NMA’s business, leading to stronger relationships with surgeon offices and, ultimately, more referrals and revenue.
“Referring providers are sending us referrals with confidence and we’re showing up consistently. We’ve severely limited the potential of messing up and missing work that was referred to us” — Nick Luekenga
As a result, NMA has been able to grow their practice without increasing their headcount.
“I think a lot of the cost-benefits for us have been not needing to hire additional headcount. In the last three years we’ve tripled in size and our administrative team that supports the business is the same size today as it was then. You could argue that we’ve saved millions in not having to onboard and train new members. And that doesn’t even account for the turnover and inaccuracies we would have during their training period.” — Nick Luekenga
Nick and his team are continuing to innovate and develop unique solutions around Tennr to help push his business outcomes and patient care even further.
“Tennr’s obviously done more than we initially engaged it to do because we saw what it could do and then tried to start applying it to our own systems. We continue to find new use-case scenarios across the business for Tennr” – Nick Lukenga
