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The Practice Marketing Podcast
Are you a Physical Therapy business owner who wants to GROW your clinic...but you feel like you lack the time or business training to reach your potential?
The Practice Marketing Podcast highlights successful marketing strategies from North America’s fastest-growing Physical Therapy clinics so you can learn from their wins and power your patient growth in 1 hour or less.
Host Neil Trickett, PT grew his physical therapy business into a 7-figure thriving business before he exited successfully in 2010.
Then he founded Practice Promotions (www.practicepromotions.net), a 7-figure marketing agency that has helped thousands of physical therapy, chiropractic, physiotherapy, rehab, and private practices over the last 14 years to thrive in the U.S. and Canadian markets.
His passion is for helping practice owners grow their businesses through effective marketing, empowering them to help the people in their communities, and to have the freedom and lifestyle they want to live.
The Practice Marketing Podcast
Introducing the Spry x Practice Promotions Integration
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Your PT clinic already has valuable patient data, but are you using it to drive growth?
In this episode, Neil Trickett, PT and CEO of Practice Promotions, sits down with Brij Bhuptani, CEO and Co-Founder of Spry Healthcare, to discuss the new Spry × Practice Promotions integration and how connecting your EMR with your marketing can help PT clinics improve patient retention, reactivation, and growth.
We cover:
- Why PT clinics often struggle to turn patient data into marketing opportunities
- How your EMR can become a growth asset—not just a clinical documentation tool
- What the new Spry × Practice Promotions integration does and how it works
- How patient data like last visit, last eval, total visits, and gender can power targeted campaigns
- How automated campaigns can help reactivate patients and improve retention
- Why securely connecting patient data matters for privacy, security, and compliance
- What Phase II of the integration means for website lead capture and new patient intake
- What PT owners using—or considering—Spry should know about the partnership
If you want to get more value from the patient data your practice already collects and connect your clinical and marketing systems more effectively, this episode will show you what’s possible.
Want to grow your PT clinic with smarter marketing? Contact the Practice Promotions team at https://practicepromotions.net/!
Hello and welcome to the Practice Marketing Podcast, highlighting successful strategies for North America's fastest growing clinics and experts so you can learn from their wins and power your practice growth. I'm your host, Neil Trickett, CEO of Practice Promotions, and today we're introducing the Spry and Practice Promotions integration. And today I'm talking with Bridge Battani, CEO and co-founder of Spry Healthcare. And Spry began when a worn-down physiotherapist complained to Bridge about the lack of any comprehensive new age tech for physical therapy clinics. And Bridge found she was right. So he found that physical therapists were basically stuck in these five to seven disparate point tools that meant running from pillar to post for every small little task. And together with his co-founder Riyaz Ramin, Bridge founded SPRI, which is a practice management and it's also an EMR solution for physical therapy clinics to basically destroy fragmented healthcare operations, and that's going to allow them to grow. And today we're excited to announce a new integration between practice promotions, marketing systems, our engage email system, and Spry. And this integration will make it easy to send marketing emails to your patient list. And we'll go into a little bit more details on this podcast. So, British, welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_01Hey Neil, thank you for inviting me over. Excited to be here and obviously very excited about the partnership that we are embarked upon. Yeah, we have embarked upon.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. I think this is going to be fantastic for Sprite customers and people who are considering switching to SPRI. It's a great solution for them. So we'll talk about that here a little bit. But from your seat, as you're running Spry EMR, which is built for PTs, uh, what do you see as the biggest gap between the patient data that's in clinics and that way that they're collecting it and the way that they're actually using it for marketing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's a great question, right? And um I think the biggest thing that I see as a gap is the clinical data or the payment. There are two aspects of why a patient comes to care, right? Uh to get better, obviously. And uh they choose a clinic or they obviously plan their care basis, how the insurance covers or does not cover the treatment, right? I don't see these things making it well to the other side, right, when they are sending out marketing. So I see marketing, okay, person cancelled, get him back on the platform, or a person is no show, they're not adhering to the plan of care. I don't think there is enough depth on the clinical side or on the payment side, which are two crucial factors, and why the people why people or the patients might not be showing up. Or what is stopping them? What are the constraints, right? Is it uh is it that they are already feeling better, they hit their they feel they've met their goals, or they feel they've not been meeting their goals, right? Or is it are they worried about their copace? They didn't realize their copace would be so high that they see the first few bills and then they realize okay, this is not for me. So I think a decision whether to continue with care or not continue with care is a lot there's a lot of factors, clinical and payments being two more important ones. And then obviously there are the behavioral parts which we can talk about. So none of these make it in the conversations that I have, right, to the marketing communication, marketing messaging, right? I've seen some tools as well, very generic tools that okay, send all of send a common email to everyone who's not come for more than 30 days or not, and that right. Okay, tell them these were their goals, we are halfway through the goals, and yeah, this might be a good time for you to continue care. Or you did a good job of getting your auth going, right? You helped us, you got your auth going. Why don't you continue care and also try to understand why they're not showing up, right? So right now I see a lot of one-way communication, I see a lack of nuance. A lot of that nuance is available in the EMR, uh, a lot of that nuance is available in the billing systems, and spry being an integrated platform has both of those things, right? So you can make the information much richer, you can make the communication much stronger, much more personalized, and uh much more contextual, right? And today in the age of AI, if you think about it, everything is about context, right? Otherwise, everyone can do pretty much everything. So um that's what I think is the biggest gap uh with some of the integrations I have seen. And I'm hoping that along with you we can fill fill some of those gaps.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I totally agree. And I think if we look at it, um you're looking at it from the patient experience side of it, right? So what is their experience before they even come to you for the first time? What's their experience like for that first time, ongoing care? Um, can you answer a lot of their concerns and questions or things they're not even thinking about, even before they get into the clinic? And then as you were talking about too, billing, you know, it's a touchy subject, right? Finance is a touchy subject, and uh people, it's very confusing for people in terms of their insurance benefits and what they may have to pay deductible-wise or copay-wise. So we have to realize that, and the cleaner uh we can use our EMR information to help us with that billing and make it much more of a seamless process. So we can give them the right information, um, whether authorizations are needed, how many visits you're allowed, uh, what's your deductible, what's your copay. And don't it's not it's not just about that, right? Like the main thing is like, how are you gonna overcome your pain or get your body better and get back to health and wellness? And are you willing to invest? And so that's part of the job within the clinic is are you marketing it well enough that the person sees the value in your services for that billing? But I think the the more technology that we have, that seamless that makes this patient experience richer, that's where I see clinics really growing and expanding, is that they've they've put a lot of effort into that patient experience using technologies, using their EMR and using marketing uh for that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, and so have is that as you're talking with different practice owners, is that a mistake that you've seen? Is that they just treat their EMR as sort of a clinical documentation tool rather than using it as a growth asset for their practice?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, actually, I don't I see that across entire all of healthcare to be honest, right? Not just in PT. Um EMRs were designed or built for storing a lot of clinical context, patient recovery context in our in the case of PT, uh patient illness context, right? Um eventually a lot of people thought of them as billing machines or compliance machines, right? And it's a lot more than that. And uh obviously, if you go back to five years back, were the notes uh comprehensive which gave you all the information or I'm not sure because yeah, there is it's combo, it's a cumbersome process for a therapist or provider to write the note as well. But now with AI scribes, the information can be so much more richer. You can you are actually recording the entire conversation, right? And think of it we keep on blaming Google and the other guys and the big guys, okay. They're listening to us, they understand us, and they advertise uh basis what we know. With Scribe, you have that, right? Uh you have that, you have the entire conversation recorded, you know where the patient is feeling, you how they're feeling and what they're going through. And I'm not saying you s you snoop on them or you do anything like that, but you can use that to contextualize your communication so much more. So I personally believe yes, and I think uh earlier the problem was getting adoption, right? Now that adoption has happened on both sides and the adoption is much deeper with Scribe. I think there's a lot of rich information sitting out there which anyone could use for their matter, the therapists, the patients, uh, the front office, or even any agent for their matter, or automation as you call it, right? To actually have that personalized conversation with the patient, explaining them about their goals and why they should invest in care, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I 100% right on that. And and I think going even further, what can be difficult from a practice owner standpoint, especially if you have many providers, is there's lots of individual conversations going on. And so that's a lot of data, right? A lot of information, right? Um how can you leverage that uh to make it a much more personalized experience and a greater outcome for the patient? So that's the beauty today of like AI Scribe and things like that from a documentation standpoint, is that your system could potentially pick up on indicators that the patient might be, you know, unhappy or just they have a higher potential for dropping. Um so that could be even a notification then to the therapist, like, hey, this is a higher warning sign that this patient doesn't see that they're making progress. Um, maybe a manager gets involved at that point so they can have a conversation, keep the patient on, because they have to kind of break through uh this certain pain threshold, or they don't realize that it just takes a little bit longer for them to get to the outcomes that they want. So the the hardest part from a clinical standpoint is when the patient uh just doesn't show up anymore, right? Or they don't schedule anymore on the on the book, and you're like, what happened to so and so? Uh and then you don't trying to get them back from calling them on the phone is very difficult, right? But if we can, if we can pull some, if the the data can help us flag um you know higher higher risk of churning patients, we can we can have those conversations before. We used to do that back with paper surveys back in the old day, right? But now we have a lot more technology now with AI, like we can have these indicators and pick up on a quicker basis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and you put up you bring up a very important point, right? I think I spoke about clinical data and billing data. Your EMR is also a rich trove of practice management, rather, is a rich trove of information for behavioral data. You can actually build a proxy for how engaged the patient is, right? Uh did they show up on time? What's the cancellation rate for the case? Are they adhering to the plan of care, right? Um, do you have to push them a lot to get them to the clinic? Are they filling out the paperwork? You send them digital intakes, you send them patient-reported outcome measures, right? Are they complying to that? Are they filling out? Are they involved in the care, right? And then uh home exercise programs is a good praxis whenever they are doing home exercise programs. So there is so much of PT. The therapy is like, unlike a dental or any other profession, where a lot of treatment happens within the clinic walls, in physical therapy or any therapy for that matter, a lot of treatment also happens outside, which you're not aware of. And some companies have used this pretty well, right? I know uh diabetes management company used this, trigger their wristbands, and obviously a lot of it was automated where they fall with the sugar spiked or whatever it is, and they would send a notification to the patient, okay. That's how they control diabetes. Like companies like Li Wong have done that. So there's a lot of behavioral data that you can deduce. And if you think technology for all this, this is available, right? I think we call it I I came from a consumer world, consumer technology world, where you have millions of users. How do you million how do you personalize it at millions of user scale, right? You cohort the data, you figure out different cohorts, and you call it customer life cycle management. If you are sure of what your business is, what your feature, what the characteristics of your patients are, then you can actually build this out, right? And I think going back, thinking about how patients, why patients, and then you it's an evolving model. And today with AI actually comes all over. So it's a combination of behavioral, clinical, and billing data. When you combine the three, it's very, very strong trifactor that clinics can use and and platforms can use to actually market to the customers, reach out to the customers better, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I love that. And so let's talk a little bit about the uh the spry and the practice person integration that we built together. Um, one of the challenges that we've commonly seen is that in the clinic, there's multiple uh tech stack, right? There's different softwares that the team has to use. And typically when it comes to marketing, you've got your EMR data, which is like where all your patient information and just simple things there, whether it's patient emails, uh phone numbers, things like that. It's very hard to um uh integrate that to other software systems, right? Basically, if you want to send out a marketing email, you have to export your list from your EMR and then you have to uh put it into your uh email marketing software and then be able to send out your monthly newsletter or whatever you're doing uh to market to your patients. So uh can you explain in plain terms what the integration that we built together does and um how that helps spray customers?
SPEAKER_03The top 10% of PT owners aren't just surviving, they're thriving. But what's their secret? Well, Neil Trigott's new Market to Grow book reveals how the top 10% of PT practices leverage marketing systems to simultaneously grow their new patients, attract top talent, and boost profit in their practice. You can learn from their secrets. Visit practicepromotions.net slash book to claim your free copy of Market to Grow. Yes, you heard that right. We are shipping a free copy of Market to Grow to all podcast listeners who want it. Just visit practicepromotions.net slash book to claim your free book. And now back to the show.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and um, and I've been a big ad advocate of that. If you read about my writings on LinkedIn, that system should be open, clinics should have the choice, right? Because I as a consumer I put myself in the therapist shoes. I would want choices, right? I wouldn't want to be confined to one platform uh for that matter, right? And I would want choices. And we made SPRI that day from day one, right? We it's an open platform. Uh you can read right into spray, you can read from spray, obviously with checks and balances, right? We just got an ONC certification, which we'll announce next week, which means we can talk into not only with other tools, but we can talk to health exchanges as well. Eventually, you want the country to get fitter, you want to get better, and the more data it is, and today data processing is easy. I think the integration with practice promotions is exactly like that, right? Uh it will be one way to start with and then two with. Everything that happens in the clinic with respect to that patient will be an event or a web of corona notification that goes to practice promotions, right? And then your team or the clinic can set up workflows. So if the patient initial evaluation was done, yeah, with your notification on this, so you can actually send them welcome or the patient's plan of care is not at the end, right? It's not happening. The patient's uh this has been discharged, you want to get them back later on, right? So besides the basic information of the patients, every event that the patient and the therapist undergo essentially will be an event or notification that we sent to practice promotion. And then it's up to the clinic and your advisors to work with the owners to figure out what is the communication that we send out at what time, right? And this is the preliminary information that we send. So everything about the care, everything about the behavior, some parts of the behavior and some aspects of the billing will be sent to practice promotion, right? And then on your side, you can create workflows tools to essentially trigger the right communication at the right time. So you're not broadcasting, spamming everyone, you'll get your emails to be clear. And I think very, very excited about what we can achieve once we go deeper, right? That's the one way part of it. Going forward, uh, when practice promotion starts advertising, uh I know you do a lot of work on clinics getting more patients. We can actually sync them back into Sprite. I think that's phase two of the integration. So we can sync that back into Sprite, that becomes the lead uh and then the lead management can be done on Sprite. But I think that's part two. But this is the integration we're doing. It remains seamless for the clinic owner, so she doesn't have to worry about uploading a list from here, downloading a list there, sending all the events. You just set it up once and it happens in the background. And then you're looking at outcomes, not looking at integrations. The problem and as you alluded in the beginning in my introduction, that clinics clinic owners are spending so much time getting tools to work that they forgot about the outcomes. They were exhausted by the time that they got the tools to work. Now you don't have to worry about the tools working. This will be all you automated and the door working for you. And you worry about the outcome. You monitor your plan of care compliance return spry. Okay, it's not this patient is not complying. Go to practice promotion, see okay, this mail, is it easy? Is this person even engaging with my content? And you have the answer right there. Okay, this is what I need to tweak, right? You can focus on the outcome and triage the outcome rather than triaging tools, whether they're working with each other or not.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Yeah, so we're really excited about this. Um there's there's typically like two different ways of email marketing. First of all, we'll talk about like how you want to be keep, you know, keep connection with your patients. So the patients that are coming in currently, and then also past patients that have come in, how can you get them to refer friends and family, come back in again, uh, and keeping good communication, tell them what's going on in the clinic? Uh is really critical, but doing it from a obviously a great marketing standpoint. So the the key there is that a lot of outside systems, email marketing-wise, are built for more graphical kind of emails, right? So you can have a lot more content in there, you can have visuals, you can have video, all kinds of things within your email that make it more of a marketing type email. And then there are that's a different than what might get sent out via the EMR, because the EMR is more reminders or it's more of a kind of a personal type of reminder or uh information from the say physical therapist or the front desk or the billing part type person. Um and that will that's kind of stuff that would go out from the EMR side. But we're talking about the actual marketing style emails that go out. And so typically, um, like with our engaged email system, we have that built out. Putting our team's putting together great content for uh clients uh to send that out. But the difficulty has been triggering things at the right time based off of people's experiences in the clinic and also pulling that email list uh out of the EMR, which usually has to be manual, and then you put it back into a system like Engage or if you're using constant contact or something like that, right? Um so this is great because we actually have this one-way APN API now that which is secure, brings in those important fields uh from Spry, such as the, of course, like patient name, uh date of birth, eval, uh date, last visit, total visits, um, and of course, email lists and phone numbers, things like that. And then that can trigger uh certain campaigns within the marketing emails, right? So you're hitting people at the right time with the right message, with great visual type emails, and that gets people to act, right? So we're very excited about that. And then what Bridge was also talking about was the second phase is more of new clients, right? New patients coming in. And so uh we drive a lot of people to uh a client uh a practices website, and then typically uh they'll you know fill out a form online, whether it's a chatbot form or they go through a regular form, and then that's going uh as a notification email-wise to the front desk. And then of course they have to talk to the call the patient back, go through all of that information, then manually input data into the EMR. Um, but now phase two, when people fill out that data online, it should be able to go automatically into Sprite EMR, and that makes it a really seamless um for the front desk, right? And they can just verify the information is correct that the patient put in, and it starts that whole journey a lot faster. And then, of course, it also can then trigger different campaigns right away uh once they fill that that form and all they're getting all their email marketing so they don't have to necessarily wait uh for more communication. We're we're capturing that that person and starting them on their journey a lot faster. So super excited um about that.
SPEAKER_01Exactly, right? I think a lead originating on practice promotion, why does it need to come to Sprite, right? It's obvious because practice promotion, when it comes from Spry, Sprite can do verify eligibility automated, right? It can see the eligibility. When you call that patient, you can say, okay, this is the coverage that you have. And or if if the clinic also sees this a patient needs authors and actually get the information for the auth and actually apply for that, right? So when you're going to a patient, you're going prepared uh with all the information. So the patient also feels confident that these guys know what they're talking about, and just makes it easy, right? And uh it's always as I said, it's not whether you like the clinic, don't like the clinic, whether you need care. There's a patient coming to the clinic has multiple dimensions to it and behavioral stuff. So I think the more you do it, the deeper you get, I think the better chance you have of getting the patient in the schedule.
SPEAKER_02That's awesome. And so for for you, Bridge, is there any um any new um tech that you're developing for with Spry to help clinics move forward?
SPEAKER_01Uh quite a bit. I think uh uh as I said for me uh the marriage of clinical data, billing data, and behavioral, right? And how does it impact behavior is I think something I'm very very fascinated about. And then doing this for multi-speciality clinics, right? Where a patient is going through a lot of these so distilling, demystifying all of that. And then I think the medium doesn't matter, right? I think you call them or you send them an email, so demystifying that, making it easy for clients to interpret this data, understand this data so they can effectively communicate to this and give them tools. I think it's important. Uh I think the second part is want to also orient spray, want to take spry for from being a feature-driven system to an outcome-driven system, right? Let's step back and see why are we doing what both of us are doing. We are doing this so that we ensure that the therapist has a reasonably filled calendar, right? Now it doesn't matter, I send out five emails, thousand emails, five thousand emails, right? At the end of the day, any clinic owner or any therapist would want that. I have a schedule which has 90-95% utilization, and I'm getting patients in the clinic who are willing to pay, who want that care, or who complete the plan of care. So, how can we work with clinics towards an outcome rather than just selling a feature? Because eventually the job of the therapist is to train or this or to or to treat the patient, right? Not worry about all of these things. Um, like does it matter if I send out a thousand emails or five thousand emails? If if if my schedule is 95% booked and I have all the right patients with the right plans, right insurance on my schedule, I wouldn't care about so I think move more towards an outcome orientation and then do whatever it takes to actually get there, right? Rather than building another feature, another feature, another feature. So, how do you bring it all together? Um, for example, should I worry about lost patients? Should I worry about plan of care? Should I worry about authorization? All of that should be combined, meshed into one, and then figure out how do you iterate, and it's not a one-time thing, it's an iterative thing, right? You iterate summer as we were talking about well for that. Summer people have a different schedule, winter people have a different schedule, right? And different different aspects of your life impact your behavior. So, how do you make it easy for the company? And this work towards the outcome is essentially what Spry is building towards.
SPEAKER_00And those are the things I'm very excited about. That's awesome. Love it.
SPEAKER_02And so for our listeners out there, uh, if you haven't checked out Spry and you're you're considering uh switching your EMR, I think it's a great opportunity to uh definitely look at what they have. What's the best way, uh Bridge, for people to check out uh Spry Healthcare?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think um go on spraypt.com. It's a very easy demo to book. I think we're very responsive there. I'm always available on LinkedIn, so people have can feel free to reach out to me, Bridraj Bukhtani. I'm pretty uh not only me, many people from my team are actually, right? The fastest way to get the right person talking, go to spraypt.com without an easy form. We ask very basic details, um, and then we'll make sure someone reaches out to you the next day or so, right? Um and yeah, that's awesome.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so if you're uh want to want more information, we'll put it in the show notes too. Uh, but Sprypt.com, uh you can learn about the AI native platform that they built there for outpatient rehab clinics. Uh great stuff, very exciting. We work with uh their clients too, and just hearing great, great uh outcomes from there. So check them out. Chris, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We appreciate um you being on here telling us about Spry and then also the cool integration that we've built together. Um so thank you for that.
SPEAKER_01And I really need to tell you about what possibilities there, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. Thank you for having me here. Excellent. Thank you, and thank you to our listeners. We appreciate that. Uh for more details, go ahead and uh like and subscribe the podcast. And also we put these up on our YouTube channel so you can like and subscribe our channel on there, and of course, go to practicepromotions.net uh for more marketing tips and advice. So this is Neil Trickett from the Practice Marketing Podcast, wishing you much success in your practice.
SPEAKER_03A free way for you to support our show is by leaving a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It's a chance for you to tell us what you love about the show and it helps others discover it as well. Just scroll down to Ratings and Review on your phone and click write a review. Thanks.