"With Kaizen, it feels like we have an entire digital workforce at our disposal. In fact, we would have needed to double our current headcount to get through the same amount of work. It's been an absolute gamechanger." - Kristi Hamilton, Revenue Cycle Director at Gracent
About
Gracent is a leading pediatric therapy provider offering ABA therapy, neuropsychology, and developmental support to children with autism across the United States. Backed by Altamont Capital and KKR, the organization supports families through established brands like North Shore Pediatric Therapy and Gracent Pediatric Therapy, with 17 locations across Illinois and Texas.
Challenge
Resource-intensive authorizations drained bandwidth for patient-facing work
Like many organizations operating in the fast-moving and heavily regulated healthcare vertical, Gracent is no stranger to the administrative overhead associated with prior authorizations. However, as they scaled, increasing both locations and patient count, this once-manageable task quickly became an all-consuming bottleneck.
Kristi Hamilton, Revenue Cycle Director at Gracent, witnessed this challenge firsthand. With 15+ patients onboarded every day for neuropsych alone, her lean team would spend countless hours verifying benefits, submitting authorizations into their EMR, and handling PDFs for documentation. Not only did these tedious, manual processes leave little to no bandwidth for patient-facing work, but they also caused authorization delays that directly impacted bottom-line revenue.
"We would receive messages that patients were coming in within an hour, and we still didn't have verification completed," Kristi shares. "If we couldn't get their information in time, we would simply have to write that session off."
Kristi knew that adding internal headcount or migrating to an EMR that didn't require manual authorization for every patient would be highly complex, expensive, and time-consuming. So, she sought a solution that would empower her lean team to place their most repetitive tasks on autopilot through comprehensive, flexible, and no-code automations.
Fortunately, she didn't have to search for long. After consulting with trusted colleagues within the industry, Gracent's CFO recommended Kaizen, and Kristi immediately knew its healthcare-tailored workflows would be the ideal fit.
"We had an authorization team of five people, each dedicated to a specific area of treatment, and everybody was busy from the minute they clocked in to the minute they clocked out. Nobody wants to be bogged down in work like that. That's why we use Kaizen."
Solution
A digital employee that streamlines core workflows in minutes
Getting started with Kaizen was a quick and collaborative process.
Kristi worked directly with the Kaizen team to build immediate familiarity and decode complex programming logic in a way that felt accessible and intuitive. "Their team's continuous assistance made us feel incredibly supported," Kristi shares. "They were always willing to get on a call, walk through the logic of our workflows, and ensure we were extracting maximum value from the partnership."
Today, Gracent executes all authorization workflows spanning applied behavior analysis, occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy, and neuropsych testing through Kaizen. Each authorization workflow runs autonomously, triggering follow-up actions based on previous results without human intervention.
For Kristi, Kaizen has impacted her team in the following ways:
Automated eligibility verification
Kaizen now handles 50-90% of all eligibility verification workflows at Gracent, pulling verification needs, submitting data to external systems, generating a clean PDF, and automatically classifying documents within the organization's records. This alone has saved Kristi's team countless hours per week, which they now allocate to more proactive, patient-facing work.
Seamless system integration
Because Kaizen integrates with Gracent's VOB system, it eliminates manual submissions, status checks, and messy document exports. Now, Kristi's team automatically generates cleaner, audit-ready PDFs and classifies them directly into the EMR without introducing any administrative overhead.
Enhanced teamwide visibility
At the end of every workflow, Kaizen emails a condensed summary to all team members detailing which clients were engaged, the outcome of the interaction, and whether they experienced anything out of the ordinary. These emails not only eliminate knowledge silos but also help the team prioritize automations that might need slight tweaks to better meet client standards.
Proactive reporting capabilities
Kaizen's impact extends far beyond operational workflows, serving as a critical layer of oversight for Gracent's leadership. When changes in Illinois law introduced new supervision requirements for clinicians, Gracent's existing systems struggled in tracking the necessary data. Kristi's team utilized Kaizen to synthesize disparate information from Power BI and other internal reports, creating a real-time visibility tool that flags non-compliance by location. This automated oversight eliminates the need for manual data manipulation or expensive software add-ons, providing Gracent, and its stakeholders, with a scalable framework to maintain clinical standards during rapid expansion.
For Gracent, a fast-moving pediatric therapy provider with a lean administrative team, Kaizen proved to be the ultimate unlock.
"Kaizen enables us to focus on the real work of helping families and providing transformative care. I'm just waiting for it to one day say, 'Good morning, Kristi, what do you want me to do today?' because it's so advanced."
Results
Effortless authorization flows, reclaimed revenue, and a foundation for further efficiency
With Kaizen, Gracent unlocked a fundamentally new approach to healthcare administration, automating up to 90% of authorizations while transitioning from reactive data entry to proactive patient care.
- 50% reduction in administrative headcount requirements
- 90% of eligibility verification workflows automated by Kaizen
- $9.6K in revenue recovered monthly by eliminating session write-offs
Looking ahead, Gracent plans to scale these efficiencies into patient accounts and credentialing while exploring chained workflows and automated reporting to support the organization's continued growth.
"My team talks every week about opportunities for automation and what we can do with Kaizen. We know the more that Kaizen grows and updates on their end, the more efficiency gains we'll unlock."
