Synergy Orthopedics services millions of referred patients annually via 500 consignment locations across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, New York, and North Carolina.
Such high volume put stress on Synergy’s operations, resulting in a 10,000-document backlog.
Synergy needed a solution to standardize and automate processes, speed up patient processing, and improve cash flow. So they partnered with an AI platform. But it wasn’t Tennr.
The Challenge
A Failed Implementation
To combat this operational bottleneck, Sarah Staley, Senior Manager at Synergy Orthopedics, signed a partnership with a Denver-based document automation vendor with the hopes of eliminating their backlog and gaining efficiency. But what she got was an 8-month headache.
“I don’t know if you can even call it an implementation. It was a nightmare. We were hitting roadblock after roadblock because we were so focused on small things and not the bigger picture.” Sarah Staley, Senior Manager, SmartCare and AI Digital Solutions, Synergy Orthopedics.
The tech they signed up for couldn't handle the reality of day-to-day work within the processes that Sarah and her team had relied on for years. The platform struggled to read the documents that had worked for Synergy and their referral partners for years. Failed to address the time-intensive data entry that both intake and billing teams had to contend with, and never got off the ground. Synergy spent weeks of implementation in back-and-forth meetings with their vendor, blocked on narrow technical constraints.
"It felt more like the technology just wasn't there, that they didn't have the capability to do some of what we thought. It felt like we were led to believe that this was better than it actually was."
The operational cost was visible everywhere. Sarah described hallways lined with boxes of unscanned paperwork, creating a backlog of unentered claims; patients would be seen in January, but their claims would not reach billing teams until March, and cash collection suffered as a consequence.
Life with Tennr
Moving Patients Forward
Once Synergy implemented Tennr, those boxes disappeared. As Tennr pushed clean, complete claims into their EHR at a record pace. Synergy was able to:
- Reduced backlogs from 6 weeks to same-week turnaround
- Created 33% more invoices MoM
- Increased patients processed per team member from 80 per day to more than 150
Not only does it save time on data entry during order creation, but the completion of insurance information and verification that the billing teams used to have to pick up.
As Sarah puts it, “Now the hallway’s empty.”
Going Forward
From Discord to Synergy
Beyond the efficiency gains, Synergy finally feels good about the team they have in their corner. Rather than forcing rigid workflows, Tennr trained custom models on Synergy’s own documents and worked alongside their operations team to move patients forward and protect revenue.
When asked about Synergy’s experience with Tennr so far, Chief Operating Officer of Synergy Orthopedics John LaRocco said, “It just feels like the whole flow and rhythm is faster. Without Tennr, going from manual to automated intake would have been daunting.”