StayCourse

Idea

An AI-native plan-of-care completion and revenue-recovery dashboard for independent outpatient physical therapy clinics. Clinics upload their existing EMR's patient and visit data; StayCourse scores every active patient's silent-dropout risk, puts a real dollar figure on the insurance-authorized visits at risk of going unused, and drafts personalized win-back messages for staff to approve and send before the patient self-discharges. It works alongside any EMR through CSV import, so a clinic never has to switch systems to get it.

Market gap

Up to 70% of physical therapy patients never complete their prescribed plan of care, and 20% quit after just three visits, per industry attendance data. That is not the same problem as a missed appointment: it is a patient who keeps showing up, then quietly stops before the clinically prescribed course is done, taking their remaining insurance-authorized (and clinic-billable) visits with them.

89% of the roughly 39,000 US outpatient PT clinics are independent or part of small regional groups running on a patchwork of EMRs (WebPT, TheraOffice, Prompt, Clinicient, Raintree, and others). The one EMR vendor that has built a retention product, WebPT's Patient Acquisition & Retention module, only works for WebPT's own customers, and it is oriented around appointment reminders and lead generation, not around scoring which currently-attending patients are about to silently self-discharge or quantifying the dollars sitting in their unused authorization. Every other tool in the space (Curogram, TheraOffice's Schedule Optimizer, RTM vendors) treats the symptom, filling a cancelled slot or texting a reminder, not the underlying plan-of-care completion problem. Timing is right because PE-backed consolidation is pushing 200 to 300 independent clinics a year to sell, and the remaining independents are under growing pressure to defend the revenue and margin that keeps them independent.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Bottom-up:

• ~32,000 to 33,000 independently owned or small-regional-group outpatient PT clinics in the US (Source: Orbital, largest PT chains data, June 2026).
• Assume an average per-clinic annual contract value of $4,200 (a $350/month Growth-tier subscription, the anchor tier for a 4 to 10 provider clinic).
• TAM = 32,500 clinics x $4,200 = $136.5M.

SAM: clinics that already run a dedicated PT EMR and have more than one provider (more likely to have the volume and existing digital workflow to adopt an add-on tool). Estimated at 60% of independents = ~19,500 clinics x $4,200 = $81.9M.

SOM: a realistic 3 to 5 year capture for a small, bootstrapped team selling into a fragmented, EMR-agnostic niche, at 2% of SAM = 390 clinics x $4,200 = **$1.6M ARR**.

Assumptions: clinic count and independence rate from Orbital's PT chains dataset; pricing assumption is a mid-point estimate anchored to comparable PT-vertical SaaS pricing (WebPT, TheraOffice) and validated against the documented revenue-at-stake per clinic (see Monetization).

Monetization strategy

Monthly SaaS subscription, billed per clinic location, tiered by number of provider seats. The clinic owner or office manager is the buyer. They keep paying because the dashboard's dollar-denominated revenue-at-risk number gives them a concrete, recurring justification: Net Health has documented up to $150K or more in added annual revenue per clinic from visit-completion improvements, and even a fraction of that recovered easily clears a few-hundred-dollar monthly subscription. Retention is reinforced by workflow lock-in: once front-desk staff build the daily habit of checking the risk queue and approving win-back drafts, the tool becomes part of how the clinic operates, not a bolt-on report nobody opens.

Pricing strategy

• Starter ($249/mo): 1 to 3 providers. Core dropout risk scoring, revenue-at-risk totals, and win-back message drafts. Entry point for solo and small practices.
• Growth ($449/mo): 4 to 10 providers. Everything in Starter, plus the full revenue-at-risk dashboard with per-patient drill-down, authorized-visit countdown tracking, and priority CSV processing. This is the anchor tier: it matches the size of clinic most likely to have a dedicated front-desk role and a real revenue leak worth managing.
• Multi-site ($799/mo+, custom above 3 locations): 10+ providers or multiple locations. Adds cross-location rollup views, CSV-batch automation, and dedicated onboarding.

Lead magnet

A free, interactive "Plan-of-Care Revenue Leakage Calculator": the clinic owner enters their average visits per plan of care, estimated completion rate, and average reimbursement per visit, and gets an instant dollar estimate of their annual revenue leakage, benchmarked against published industry attendance data. It ends with a one-click offer to upload a CSV export from their EMR for a live, real risk score instead of the benchmark estimate, proving the product's value in under two minutes.

Competitors

• WebPT (Patient Acquisition & Retention module): the dominant PT EMR, 150,000+ users; bundles marketing and appointment-reminder retention tools, but only for its own EMR customers.
• Net Health / ReDoc: full PT EHR and billing suite; markets visit-completion and revenue gains (up to $150K/year) as a byproduct of its broader documentation and billing workflow, not a dedicated dropout-prediction product.
• TheraOffice (Raintree Systems): full EMR/billing platform with a "Schedule Optimizer" that refills cancelled slots from a waitlist; reactive to cancellations, not predictive of mid-plan self-discharge.
• Curogram: two-way texting layer integrated specifically with WebPT to reduce dropouts; a messaging tool, not a risk-scoring or revenue-quantification product, and locked to WebPT.
• SPRY: its own full PT EMR with AI-forward marketing around dropout warning signs; adopting it requires migrating a clinic's entire system of record.

What competitors offer now

Every current option is either (a) baked into a single EMR, so clinics not on that EMR cannot use it, or (b) focused on the earlier-funnel problem of missed or cancelled appointments (reminders, waitlist rebooking) rather than the mid-plan-of-care patient who is still showing up but statistically likely to quietly stop before the prescribed course, and their insurance authorization, runs out. None of them turn that risk into a clinic-wide dollar figure a non-clinical office manager can act on daily.

What can be done differently to attract customers

Be deliberately EHR-agnostic: sync via CSV export/import instead of requiring an EMR switch, removing the single biggest adoption barrier for a small clinic (nobody wants to migrate their system of record for a retention tool). Speak the language clinic owners already use in the vendor content and revenue-recovery marketing that exists today (dollars, not "risk scores"), and put a running dollar total on the dashboard's home screen. Lead with the free revenue-leakage calculator to convert cold clinic owners with a two-minute, benchmarked, personalized number before ever asking for a CSV upload or a credit card.