Established in 2015, Werq, Inc. is driven by a mission to address the most common communication challenges that healthcare professionals face during their day to day operations. Conceptualized by a group of ophthalmologists led by Dr. Neil S. Patel, the New York-based company offers a proprietary, platform-agnostic chat solution that helps healthcare workers ensure time optimization, increase revenue, and augment focus on delivering effective care no matter what EMR systems they use. While enhancing patient management and communication, the platform also helps clients mitigate referral leakages that typically lead to direct revenue loss.

In an interview with MD Tech Review, Dr. Neil S. Patel, CEO and Founder, Werq, Inc., shares his insights on the company’s unrivaled practice management solution and the value it brings to healthcare practices.

Can you give us an overview of the company's genesis?

As a vitreoretinal and anterior segment surgeon, I often found it challenging to streamline and optimize collaboration with my co doctors, other professionals, and patients. On raising my concerns in a boardroom meeting, I realized that everyone at New York Ophthalmology was struggling to establish effective inter and intra clinic coordination and patient-physician interaction. This was causing process inefficiencies such as poor patient tracking and higher overheads. Ultimately, it was disrupting day-to-day operations and subsequently, the overall growth of the practice.

So I decided to develop a solution that mitigates these challenges by facilitating effective healthcare communication. In initial assessment, my team and I identified that existing practice management solutions and other technology solutions were ill-suited to meet today’s needs.

Organizations could benefit from a specialized tool that would enable them to conduct efficient communication in a HIPAA-compliant fashion using EMRs. This led to the inception of our practice management platform, Werq Space.

Our robust solution is designed to revolutionize the way doctors, patients, and medical professionals communicate. It modernizes medical practices’ daily operations and help them save time and deliver better care.

Over the last decade, the U.S. has identified a rising expenditure over healthcare provision. A substantial percentage of these expenses were wasted due to manual errors by healthcare personnel. How can Werq help in this regard?

In a word automation! Our flagship product, Werq Space, is a modern patient management solution and contact center that sits on top of medical practices’ existing EMR system. Primarily designed to address the need for establishing effective communication between medical professionals and patients, this web-based platform helps clinics improve their healthcare delivery. Medical practices can receive and send text messages directly to patients, schedule and change appointments, send alerts, eliminate missed calls, and more importantly, see patients’ previous visit notes.
Werq Space plays a pivotal role in every step along the way from making an appointment to actually seeing the patient and beyond. By automating all these processes, we allow practitioners to focus on what matters most the patients in front of them.

Would you please elaborate on the key features and functionalities of Werq Space?

Werq Space consists of various tools Werq Chat, Werq Reviews, Werq Referrals, and WerqTelemed that enable clients to handle their patient relationships, referrals, communications, reviews, and telemedicine.

Werq Chat offers healthcare professionals the ability to have efficient, hassle-free, real-time inter-hospital and intra-hospital communication with double-ended encryption in a HIPAA-compliant manner. Our chat solution helps them send individual and group messages irrespective of the EMR system they use to exchange files and images and give post-operative care instructions.

Werq Reviews is another tool that makes our solution suite unique. Designed to enhance clients' online reputation, it provides patients with an opportunity to rate the practice on Google or any other physician review site after their visit.
With our secure telehealth platform WerqTelemed, we enable medical practices to conduct televisits, providing patients with uninterrupted access to care amid unprecedented events like the Covid-19 pandemic.

We introduced Werq Referrals to tackle a highly sensitive area in the healthcare industry—referral leakage. It can cause a direct revenue loss for medical practices and lead to inefficient delivery of care for the patients. Werq Referrals allows clients to efficiently manage their referrals and alleviate the increasing number of missed referrals through a healthcare collaboration network. In addition, it allows doctors to send and receive patient information, test results, and exam notes in a completely HIPAA compliant way while reducing no-shows and increasing patient traffic in the process.

Werq Space allows medical practices to receive and send text messages to patients. There is no need for patients to make phone calls to their doctors’ offices now. Campaigns can also be created to keep our patients engaged and thriving.

Could you provide us a case study that exemplifies Werq's value proposition?

We recently collaborated with a practitioner who struggled to track her referrals. Every time she employed her staff to do it, she noticed that the end results were more or less unsuccessful. With our product, she was able to automate the entire task and feel confident in the fact that it would render positive outcomes.

She was able to track her referrals and see how things progressed on a monthly basis. With the ability to see where her business was going, she could make quick changes in her operations, marketing, and overall communication strategy. She was also able to communicate with her staff using just an application over the phone avoiding all the manual hassle. Her patients were also able to send text messages to her office, and she noticed increased compliance with patients once this was implemented. In a nutshell, we empowered her with the tools to boldly step into the modern age of healthcare.


In addition to the solutions that are revolutionizing the clinical communication and collaboration space, we have several other tools in our pipeline. The next big thing is the launch of the Werq Patients app. It is a mobile application that will allow patients to find doctors, communicate with them, fill in forms, store medical histories, and manage their prescriptions without using multiple applications.

What differentiates Werq, Inc. from its competition?

We differentiate ourselves because we always put our customers and the patients first. With Werq, Inc., everything really comes down to communication and collaboration. Gone are the days when patients would call the doctor’s office to get an appointment or get their prescriptions filled. The shift to a completely digitally-driven, patient-focused healthcare model is here. We are also empowering practitioners with all the tools they need to make this transition as seamless as possible. Werq allows free communication between everyone involved be it patients to doctors, doctors to staff, or doctors to doctors.

We have a product for everyone that tackles real issues in the most effective way possible. This will allow you to focus on delivering the best care and attract more patients in the long run.