Thriving Center of Psychology is a multi-state mental health practice serving thousands of patients a year. By 2023, intake had grown from a side responsibility into a structural bottleneck — and a primary reason patients dropped off before their first session.
When I joined as Head of Product, intake was passing through three insurance verifiers, two intake coordinators, and a clinical matcher — with no system of record connecting them. A patient who submitted a form on Monday might not hear back until Thursday. Drop-off was high. Nobody had a clear view of where patients were getting stuck.
The team's assumption was that the bottleneck was therapist capacity. The assumption turned out to be wrong.
Two weeks of shadowing the intake team revealed the actual bottleneck: insurance pre-verification, handled manually by a single specialist. Everything downstream — therapist matching, scheduling, onboarding — was waiting on her queue.
Two weeks shadowing intake coordinators, logging every handoff. The bottleneck wasn't what anyone thought — and the data made the conversation about what to fix actually possible.
Rather than introduce new software the ops team would resist, we extended Tellescope to auto-triage by insurance type. Simple cases routed straight to therapist matching. Complex cases queued for the specialist. Her workload dropped 60% in weeks.
A surprising chunk of coordinator time was spent answering “where are we in the process?” calls. Automated status emails at each stage cut call volume 40% in the first month — capacity we didn't know we had.
Time-to-first-session dropped 25%. Coordinator capacity freed up enough that we handled 30% more intake volume without hiring. Patient satisfaction on the intake experience moved from 3.4 to 4.1.
I should have mapped the workflow before my first week was over, not two weeks in. I assumed the team's mental model of the bottleneck was accurate. It wasn't. The two weeks I spent designing solutions to the wrong problem cost a month of momentum.