As the saying goes, “a good scalpel makes a better surgeon, good communication makes a better doctor,” effective communication—be it inter-hospital, intra-hospital, or patient-physician—is crucial for practices to deliver proper care, reduce overhead, and increase efficiency.

While this need was already widespread, the pandemic and the waning of the “do more, bill more” model have created a rapid upsurge in demand for robust healthcare communication. Yet, unfortunately, the medical community finds itself falling behind when it comes to adopting communication technologies, which makes significant flaws and failures in the U.S. healthcare system. A study conducted by Fierce Healthcare revealed that poor communication had claimed the lives of 1,744 patients and over $1.7 billion in malpractice costs in the past five years.

Such alarming numbers have hammered home the immediate need to address inefficiencies inherent in the medical community’s reliance on landlines, faxes, pagers, and other vestiges of 20th-century technologies. Even today, healthcare professionals rely on outmoded systems to deliver care while connectivity over voice, video, and text are commonplace everywhere else.

This is precisely where Werq, Inc. makes a world of difference with its state-of-the-art practice management software!

Born to provide seamless, HIPAA-compliant communication to medical practices, the company offers robust solutions that help augment their operational excellence, provide patients with proper medical access, and reduce chances of medical errors. Medical professionals can seamlessly handle patient relationships, referrals, communication, reviews, and telemedicine while accelerating the growth of their practices by leveraging the Werq solution suite.

In an interview with MD Tech Review, Nathan Radcliffe, an Ophthalmologist at New York Ophthalmology, shares his insights on how Werq leverages its expertise and experience to build unrivaled patient management and communication solutions for clients.

Could you give us a brief overview of Werq?

Werq is a leading communication and collaboration solution provider that traces its roots back to a busy ophthalmology practice, New York Ophthalmology. Founded in 2015 by a group of ophthalmologists led by Dr. Neil S. Patel, the company was always driven by a mission to address the most common communication challenges they faced during their day-to-day operations. As a leading vitreoretinal and anterior segment surgeon, Patel often found it challenging to streamline and optimize his collaboration with his co-doctors, other professionals, and patients. On raising his concerns in a boardroom meeting, he realized that everyone at New York Ophthalmology was struggling to establish effective inter- and intra-clinic coordination and patient-physician interaction. While this led to process inefficiencies and higher overhead, they were not able to keep track of their patients and deliver proper care, which disrupted their business flow and overall growth.

Around this time, Dr. Patel decided to put his best foot forward to come up with a solution that mitigates these challenges by facilitating healthcare communication. In his initial assessments, he identified that existing practice management solutions were subpar to today’s needs and lacking a tool that sits on top of their EMRs to enable efficient communication in a HIPAA-compliant fashion.

Dr. Patel then leveraged his longstanding experience and in-depth know-how in the healthcare industry to develop a HIPAA-compliant practice management platform, Werq Space. Our robust solution is designed to disrupt the way doctors, patients, and medical professionals communicate and modernize medical practices’ daily operations to help them save time and deliver better care.

Could you elaborate on Werq’s unique solution suite?

Our flagship product, Werq Space, is a modern patient management solution and contact center that sits on top of medical practices’ existing EMR system. Primarily designed to address the need for establishing effective communication between medical professionals and patients, this web-based platform helps clinics improve the way of their healthcare delivery. Medical practices can receive and send text messages directly to patients, schedule and change appointments, send alerts, eliminate missed calls, and more importantly see patients’ previous visit notes by leveraging our Werq Space platform. Having this robust medical practice management solution readily available, they can make their patient management system as effective as possible.

Furthermore, Werq Space comprises of various tools—Werq Chat, Werq Reviews, Werq Referrals, and Werq Telemed—that enable clients to handle their patient relationships, referrals, communications, reviews, and telemedicine. Werq Chat offers healthcare professionals the ability to have efficient, hassle-free, real-time inter-hospital and intra-hospital communication with double-ended encryption in a HIPAA-compliant way. Regardless of their existing EMR, our chat solution helps them send individual and group messages, exchange files and images, and give instructions for post-operative care. Werq Reviews is another aspect that makes our solution suite unique. Designed to enhance clients’ online reputation, it provides patients with an opportunity to rate the practice on either Google or any other physician-review sites right after the visit. With our secure telehealth platform Werq Telemed, we enable medical practices to conduct televisits, providing patients with uninterrupted access to care amid unprecedented events like the Covid-19 pandemic.

How does Werq go about mitigating referral leakages in the medical space?

There is no denying that referral leakage is one of the most sensitive areas in the healthcare industry, causing medical practices a direct revenue loss and lead to inefficient delivery of care. At Werq, we specialize in helping our clients efficiently manage their referrals and alleviate the increasing number of missed referrals by offering a healthcare collaboration network, Werq Referrals. For instance, traditionally, if physicians wanted to refer a patient, they would often provide the new doctor’s name written on their prescription pad, giving the medical practitioner no track of what’s happening next. Our Werq Referrals is designed to mitigate these challenges by providing practices with a robust referral tracking system where physicians are granted complete control over their referrals. It allows doctors to send and receive patient information, test results, and exam notes HIPAA compliant, reduce no-shows and increase patient traffic.

In addition to the solutions that are revolutionizing the clinical communication and collaboration space, we’ve several other tools in our pipeline, one being Werq Conference. Medical practitioners and healthcare providers can meet securely in large teams and access important and informative virtual events featuring different keynote speakers by leveraging this first-of-its-kind virtual meeting technology. We’re also enhancing our solution suite with a campaign feature that allows medical practices to efficiently reach out to certain groups of patients through text messages, informing them about the availability of a doctor to deliver timely access to care. This way, we’re serving as a go-to partner for medical facilities, addressing their practice management needs in today’s modern healthcare environment.

How does the future look for Werq?

We pride ourselves on having an expert set of hands to pull everything together needed to establish seamless communication in the medical space and take the burden off the hands of healthcare professionals by eliminating manual works. Our solution facilitates and streamlines our clients' scheduling operations and thereby alleviates medical-legal liabilities, allowing healthcare practices to solely focus on delivering the best care to patients. The evolution of New York Ophthalmology into a leading ophthalmology practice in the U.S. well exemplifies Werq’s value proposition.

With several other medical practices finding the real potential of our solution in optimizing their practice management operations, we’re now witnessing rapid growth and garnering a broad customer base. At Werq, we always strive to empower clients with all necessary resources to accelerate their growth and reputation in the medical industry through continuous technological advancements.