Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Nancy Ham, CEO of WebPT (Part 1)

We’ve covered WebPT before, featuring founder Heidi Jannenga on Entrepreneur Journeys. We’ve also had Heidi on our roundtable.

This conversation explores the evolution of WebPT to a broader product footprint and also discusses the open issues in the physiotherapy practice management space. It also explores pain-related medical devices, the role of insurance companies, and other interesting nuances of the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by giving a brief introduction to WebPT and your current activities. As you know, we have had your founder, Heidi Jannenga, on the Entrepreneur Journeys platform as well as at our roundtable. Our audience is very familiar with WebPT.

From your point of view, let’s introduce our audience to WebPT as it is today.

Nancy Ham: I’m the CEO of WebPT. I joined two and a half years ago. It has been a transformative period. The company has more than doubled in that time through a combination of just continued, strong, organic growth and also through two very interesting acquisitions.

WebPT is a specialty EMR company for outpatient rehab. We serve 35% of our industry. That’s 15,000 clinics with the EMR. Then we serve another 5% of the industry with the EMR-agnostic products which we are interested in building out.

Sramana Mitra: We know the EMR part of the physiotherapy storyline. What is the new product?

Nancy Ham: We acquired a company called Strive Labs based in Boston. As I’d like to say, it was five guys, a girl, and a dog named Lucy. They had invented something really powerful. The company was founded by two really bright entrepreneurial young physical therapists who wanted to impact the entire industry.

Let me back up to the problem and then we’ll talk about how they helped solve the problem. There are a couple of statistics we’re obsessed with. The first one is every year, 128 million adults have a musculoskeletal condition that lasts more than three months who can benefit from physical therapy.

Only 10% of them ever start physical therapy. We call them 90% challenged. Then of the 10% that start physical therapy, about 22% of them drop out by the third visit. It’s a bit of a double whammy. This was the problem Strive was founded to improve. They help our customers with past, present, and future patients.

Over a decade, your clinic might treat tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of patients. Once you have one need for physical therapy, you’ll probably be going to have another need. We’re getting older, but we’re still physically active. We hurt ourselves and create injuries.

Strive’s a marketing automation platform except that all the clinical content unique to the individual. We can now reach out to prior patients and check them out. The Phoenix Marathon is coming up. Here are some exercises you can do to strengthen your knee. Staying continually engaged with patients is really important.

With current patients, it’s really communicating with them the way people expect now – via text and email, via a mobile app, and helping them understand what’s happening with their therapy.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Nancy Ham, CEO of WebPT
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