Guest Blog: Strengthening the Future of Outpatient Care: Partnering to Advance Meaningful Advocacy

Jeremy Hurewitz, President of WelcomeWare

Meaningful partnerships are essential for successful advocacy. Alongside physical therapy services, administrative work is the backbone of any practice. Booking appointments, scheduling meetings, and taking phone calls help ensure that patients can access routine care.

Vendors often see patterns across many practices, including where administrative friction delays care, increases staff workload, or limits growth. This perspective is essential to our provider partners working to protect access, advance quality care, and support the long-term strength of physical therapy practices.

This is why WelcomeWare is partnering with APTQI and provider groups to advocate for legislative reforms to improve patient access to preventative care and regulatory reforms to stabilize reimbursement. Collaboration and advocacy are essential to ensuring patients receive quality community-based care. 

How does WelcomeWare’s partnership with APTQI benefit physical therapy practices?

By partnering with APTQI, WelcomeWare joins the unified front of the outpatient rehabilitation industry. While APTQI advocates for legislative stability on Capitol Hill, WelcomeWare provides the technology and administrative support to help practices respond to rising operational costs and continued reimbursement pressures.

Practices using our hybrid staffing model have reported labor cost reductions of up to 60%. WelcomeWare also works to ensure that its product roadmap addresses the specific regulatory hurdles identified by APTQI leadership and provider members. This alignment helps practice managers adopt solutions that support quality standards and Medicare compliance requirements. 

Why Vendor Engagement Is Vital to APTQI’s Advocacy Mission

We see every day how operational challenges inside physical therapy clinics affect access to care. When front-desk teams are stretched thin, calls go unanswered, scheduling slows down, patients wait longer for support, and clinical teams feel the pressure of an added administrative burden. These challenges become even harder to manage as practice leaders face higher labor and supply costs and shrinking reimbursement from payers.

APTQI’s advocacy work matters because these operational pressures are directly connected to policy, reimbursement, and access to care. If clinics do not have the resources and staffing support they need, patients ultimately feel the impact.

In addition to APTQI’s advocacy priorities to prevent senior falls and stabilize Medicare rates, we look forward to supporting initiatives designed to strengthen the physical therapy workforce while offering effective technology solutions that improve efficiencies and enable therapists to prioritize face time with patients.

Vendor engagement within APTQI plays a meaningful role. Vendors often see patterns across many practices, including where administrative friction delays care, increases staff workload, or limits growth. As a technology partner focused on virtual front-desk support, WelcomeWare brings that operational perspective to APTQI’s broader mission of preserving patient access and stabilizing payment models.

Our role goes beyond providing technology. By bringing providers and vendor partners together, APTQI helps ensure advocacy reflects the full reality of running an outpatient clinic today. Through that shared effort, we can support a future where clinics have fair policies, sustainable operations, and practical support to stay focused on what matters most: delivering high-quality care to patients.

Jeremy Hurewitz is the President of WelcomeWare, an administrative solutions provider that enhances healthcare operations through interactive kiosks, live virtual assistants, and digital intake forms.