Hannah Kim: Front Office Bottlenecks in Physical Therapy Clinics

Dr. Karen Litzy speaks with Hannah Kim, CEO and co-founder of Pocket, about the hidden operational burden that happens before a patient ever reaches the clinic door. They break down why front office teams get stretched too thin, how insurance verification and scheduling create revenue leakage, and what it looks like when a clinic automates the full pre-arrival workflow without losing the human touch.

In this episode:

·       Karen frames the episode around the pre-arrival patient journey and why it matters for physical therapy clinics.

·       Hannah Kim explains Pocket's focus on automating intake, insurance verification, scheduling, and patient communications.

·       The biggest front office inefficiency is overload: one team is often handling phone calls, insurance verification, scheduling, onboarding, and patient greetings.

·       Insurance verification is more complex than checking a portal - clinics often need to call payers, confirm authorization requirements, and verify visit limits.

·       Manual verification can take hours and includes documentation, EMR entry, calculating patient responsibility, and explaining benefits to patients.

·       Growth exposes weak systems: workflows that work for one or two locations often break when a clinic scales.

·       Slow or incomplete pre-arrival responses can cause patients to book elsewhere, creating missed visits and revenue leakage.

·       Pocket aims to own the full process from start to finish, including extracting patient info from the EMR, verifying benefits, making calls when needed, creating documentation, and uploading it back into the EMR.

·       Beyond insurance, Pocket also supports intake, onboarding, case creation, first-visit scheduling, and automated patient communications.

·       Hannah shares that the best transformations free front office staff to spend more time with patients, reduce burnout, and support clinic growth without adding staff.