How to Automate 1st Providers Choice

IMS arrives already shaped for one specialty

1st Providers Choice has been building practice management and EHR software since 1983, and the product it sells is IMS. What is unusual is the way it is sold. Instead of one chart for all of medicine there are more than forty specialty editions, each arriving with the templates, codes and reports of a single field in place, and the Vascular Surgery edition is the one a vein practice runs.

That specialty is a strange hybrid. A vein clinic is surgical, but very little about it resembles an operating theatre. Duplex ultrasound is the diagnostic, done in the building, on the same machine, by the same sonographer, often more than once for the same leg. Treatment is a course rather than an event: one vein, then another, then the other leg, weeks apart.

Some of that work is medically necessary and insured. Some of it is cosmetic and paid for by the patient directly. The chart has to hold both, and so does the schedule.

Preauthorization decides which legs get treated this month

The clinical judgement is rarely the slow part. Waiting for permission is.

A practice treating insured venous disease does very little without prior authorization, and the request is a small dossier: the duplex findings, the vein diameter and reflux time, a symptom score, and evidence that the patient has already been through a period of conservative therapy with compression. It goes out. Then it sits on a payer's website, and the only way to learn what became of it is for somebody at the front desk to sign in and look.

So somebody does, every morning, payer by payer, because next month's schedule is built out of those answers. The same person is also confirming that a plan is still active, working out which balances are owed on the cosmetic side, noticing that the surgeon who used to refer two patients a month has sent nobody since spring, and pulling the list of people due for an annual recheck.

1st Providers Choice

Approvals found the morning they land Every outstanding request checked at the payer's own site overnight, sorted into ready to book, denied, and still waiting.

Second legs that never got booked Patients who finished one leg and stopped coming, listed with the date, so a course of treatment is completed rather than abandoned.

Rechecks that keep their own calendar Annual duplex studies due this quarter, ranked by how overdue, so surveillance does not depend on anyone remembering.

IMS tracks the authorization once the practice has it

The platform is not thin here, and the parts a vein practice reaches for most are worth setting up properly first.

Authorization Tracking, Eligibility Tracking and Referral Tracking are all built in, and between them they hold the state of every case: which authorization covers what, how many visits remain against it, where a referral came from. Image management brings images into the chart by scanning, faxing or saving from an external device, and Device integration imports recordings from health monitoring equipment, which is how an ultrasound ends up beside the note instead of in a folder on a shared drive.

The word carrying the weight in all of that is tracking. Authorization Tracking is a record of authorizations. It knows the number, the dates and the visits used, because a person typed them in. It does not open the payer's site on Tuesday morning and find out whether Monday's request was approved, denied or still sitting in review. Nothing inside IMS can, because that answer is not inside IMS.

The schedule can be built on what the payers decided overnight

A payer decides on Monday afternoon. The practice finds out on Thursday, when somebody has a spare twenty minutes.

Every outstanding request checked at each payer's own portal before the practice opens, sorted by what happened to it: approved and ready to book, denied with an appeal window counting down, or pending long enough that somebody should telephone. A patient's documented compression history set against what their plan asks for before the request is filed, so it goes out when it stands a chance rather than returning weeks later for a missing trial.

The people who had one leg treated and never came back for the second, listed with how long it has been. Annual duplex rechecks due this quarter, ranked by how overdue each is. Balances still owed on cosmetic packages, gathered with the treatment and the date attached rather than discovered at month end. Referring physicians ordered by how far their volume has fallen, so a relationship gets repaired while there is still one.

The boundary in a clinic does not move. Reading a payer's site, comparing what is documented against what is required, and building a list can all run unattended.

The clinic already knows what it is waiting for

None of that asks for a new system. It is the same logins the front desk already holds, worked in the same order, at an hour when the building is empty.

WebRun is an AI agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in as your own staff are, in a private environment of your own. Sessions are not shared between tools, and a workflow can be locked to an explicit list of domains, so it reaches the payer sites you named and nothing else. You can watch a run and stop it partway.

It reads and it prepares. No chart is edited, no claim is submitted, and nothing reaches a patient or a referring practice until a qualified person has approved it.

Each workflow below names the site it opens and what it leaves for you.