Doug Dzema shares how Prestige’s therapists use the OneStep EMR assistant
“When we use the EMR assist for progress notes and recertification notes, the scores are a lot higher. It objectifies the subjective, the objective, the assessment, everything in between.”
Doug Dzema, Regional Director of Operations, Prestige Rehab
Prestige Rehab provides therapy in senior living communities across the country, and its therapists have measured residents’ walking and balance with OneStep for years. Doug Dzema oversees operations across a region of those communities. His problem in 2026 was not the measuring. It was the writing: getting a month of objective data into a progress note, a recertification or an authorization request in a form a payer would accept.
Prestige grades its own documentation. Every progress note and recertification is scored by an AI tool, Prompt Insight, on how well the subjective, objective and assessment sections support reimbursement and how exposed they leave the claim to denial. Authorization requests are judged the same way: a reviewer wants to see where the patient was, where they are now, and how that compares with people their age. The therapists had the data in OneStep, but turning it into that paragraph was manual work done note by note, and the people doing it ranged from the very comfortable with new tools to, in Doug’s words, those only now getting excited about ChatGPT. Notes written under time pressure scored lower, and lower scores meant more denials and more rewriting.
OneStep’s EMR assistant writes the objective section from the patient’s own measurements. A therapist records a walk, a sit-to-stand or a timed up and go, and the assistant produces note-ready text: this month against last month, and both against age-related norms, in the sub-categories a documentation grader looks for. The therapist reads it, edits what they want, and pastes it into WebPT. The same measurements drive the patient’s fall-risk score and the suggested home exercises, so the numbers in the note match what the therapist is treating.
“It’s not only comparing September to October, it’s also comparing to their age-related norms. It’s a godsend. It’s giving us these tangible scores to input into this assessment, which is really boosting our scores and our reimbursement rate.”
Doug Dzema on the EMR assistant
Notes written with the EMR assistant score higher in Prompt Insight than notes written without it, across the subjective, objective and assessment sections, and the difference shows up in Prestige’s reimbursement rate. The first place therapists reached for it was authorization requests, where an objective comparison to age norms answers the reviewer’s question directly. The therapists Doug expected to resist a new tool are among the heaviest users, because it removes the part of the note they liked least. The home exercise program now prints and copies into the EMR from the same screen, so the objective tab and the plan come from one source.
Prestige is now extending the same measurements to residents who are not yet on caseload, with a short OneStep screen at move-in and quarterly after that, so a baseline already exists when a referral comes in.