Spotlight: Coltin Gerhart @ BoneArc
A spotlight is a short-form interview with a leader in health tech. In this spotlight, you'll hear from Coltin Gerhart, founder and CEO of BoneArc.
What does BoneArc do?
BoneArc helps musculoskeletal practices care for patients between visits. Patients get a recovery plan and a way to report pain, function, and progress. The care team can see who needs attention, document the work they perform, and prepare remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM) billing information for clinician review and handoff through its existing billing process.
How did you end up working in health tech?
It came out of my orthopedic surgery training. I kept seeing how much recovery happens after a patient leaves the clinic, when questions come up, symptoms change, and the care team has to respond. I started BoneArc to help patients stay connected to their plan and give practices a better way to follow that recovery and manage the work around it.
How does your role intersect with revenue cycle management (RCM)?
As an orthopedic surgery resident and BoneArc’s founder, I see how much of a patient’s recovery happens between visits. Check-ins, changes in pain or function, and conversations with the care team can be important to treatment, yet the work clinicians do in response is often hard to capture. BoneArc follows patients throughout recovery and bridges that gap: it helps the team see what needs attention and document work they’re already doing, so the billing record reflects the care that actually happened.
What do you think RCM will look like two years from now?
The biggest change will happen before a claim is submitted. Today, too much clinical work has to be reconstructed at the end of the month so someone can decide what is billable. I think the next generation of RCM will capture that work as it happens, check it against billing requirements, and prepare the claim inside the systems a practice already uses. Clinicians should make the clinical decisions without having to recreate the billing record afterward.