The digital front door to patient access - built one booked appointment at a time.
BetterHealthcare's product-and-brand card: the logo, the promise - "A Better Care Experience for All" - and the scheduling app that carries it. Company marketing asset.
It is stranger than it should be that booking a physician's appointment can be harder than reserving a table for two. That gap - between a patient's intent to get care and the appointment actually landing on a clinic's schedule - is the entire problem BetterHealthcare set out to close. The New York company began in 2016 as BetterPT, a booking app that a founder once described as "the OpenTable of physical therapy." Nearly a decade later it had grown into a patient-access platform spanning the wider continuum of care, and in January 2025 it was acquired by HealthBus.
What sits underneath the tidy consumer promise is a stubborn piece of infrastructure. When a patient searches for a physical therapist at 11pm, picks a time and chooses telehealth or an in-person visit, that request has to travel into the clinic's practice-management and electronic-health-record systems in real time - and back out again with the right availability. Getting that two-way sync to work, reliably, across many different clinical systems is the unglamorous work that BetterHealthcare spent years on. The booking screen patients see is the easy part.
Together, we'll create transformative opportunities to enhance the experiences of patients, providers, and payers, elevating care delivery through interoperable, data-driven, scalable products.- Greg Peters, Co-Founder & CEO
*Reported by one regional provider across 70 clinics using the BetterAccess platform.
BetterHealthcare's core product is BetterAccess, a HIPAA-compliant SaaS platform that connects patients with the right care at the right time. It offers round-the-clock online self-scheduling for both in-person and telehealth appointments, custom appointment types configurable with qualifying questions, and automated multi-channel reminders designed to cut down on the no-shows that quietly drain a clinic's day.
Behind the booking flow, the platform tracks and visualizes success metrics, digital marketing channels and patient profiles, giving providers a read on where their patients come from and where they drop off. The consumer side - the original BetterPT marketplace and patient portal - lets people search for clinics and book without picking up the phone.
The paying customers are physical therapy and rehabilitation clinics and multi-site healthcare providers; the everyday users are the patients who book through them. The platform's reach across 1,000+ facilities is what made it attractive to an acquirer operating a national rehabilitation network.
The company raised in steps rather than one headline megaround. Its 2019 Series A - $5M led by 5Lion Ventures with the Hospital for Special Surgery and the ID Fund - gave it clinical credibility as well as capital. A later $1.5M round in 2023 topped up growth. Figures below are approximate and drawn from public reporting.
The patient-access SaaS: 24/7 self-scheduling, telehealth booking, provider matching, qualifying questions and automated reminders, with analytics on patient profiles and marketing channels.
The consumer-facing app and patient portal that let people search physical therapy clinics and book in-person or telehealth visits online - the wedge the whole company grew from.
Real-time, two-way sync of scheduling and patient data with practice-management and EHR systems such as Clinicient - so bookings post automatically and clinics avoid double data entry.
Patient-access and scheduling is a crowded field - Zocdoc, Solv, Luma Health, Relatient and NexHealth all court providers, and PT-specific incumbents like WebPT bundle scheduling into practice management. BetterHealthcare's distinguishing move was to start narrow, in physical therapy and rehabilitation, and go deep on the integrations that vertical demands before widening its aperture.
That depth is the argument. Rather than treat interoperability as a checkbox, the company built bi-directional sync as a core capability - the difference between a booking widget that emails a request and a platform whose reservations land, live, inside the clinic's system. Backing from the Hospital for Special Surgery, and a co-founder who is a practicing orthopedic surgeon, gave it a clinical credibility that pure-software rivals lacked.
It also framed itself around three stakeholders at once - patients, providers and payers - rather than only the consumer or only the clinic. That three-sided ambition is harder to execute, but it is exactly the surface an acquirer running a national rehabilitation network wanted to own.
The trade-off is scale: at 27 employees and roughly $6M in estimated revenue, BetterHealthcare was never the biggest name in the category. Its edge was fit, not size - a platform shaped precisely for the rehabilitation vertical it knew best.
Greg Peters and HSS orthopedic surgeon Dr. Stephen Fealy launch in Midtown Manhattan to make booking physical therapy as easy as a reservation.
The startup draws attention for bringing consumer-grade booking to a fragmented PT market.
Led by 5Lion Ventures with the Hospital for Special Surgery and the ID Fund; cumulative funding reaches about $9.1M.
The company broadens beyond PT into a patient-access platform and rebrands as BetterHealthcare.
Two-way integration with practice-management systems like Clinicient enables automatic scheduling and patient-data sync.
A later round tops up growth capital.
HealthBus, backed by TRCM Fund, acquires the company in January to extend patient access across its national rehabilitation network.
Bi-directional EMR integration for physical therapy clinics, enabling real-time scheduling and patient-data sync.
Two-way text-messaging partnership to improve appointment communications and the patient experience.
Strategic investor and clinical partner; co-founder Dr. Stephen Fealy is an HSS orthopedic surgeon.
BetterPT set out to be the OpenTable of physical therapy - a simple promise that took years of integration work to keep.- On the company's founding thesis
Explore the platform and hear from the founder. These searches surface official demos, product walkthroughs and interviews.
It provides BetterAccess, a HIPAA-compliant SaaS platform that lets patients self-schedule in-person and telehealth appointments 24/7 while syncing bi-directionally with clinics' practice-management and EHR systems.
It was founded in 2016 as BetterPT by CEO Greg Peters and Dr. Stephen Fealy, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
Yes. In January 2025, HealthBus (backed by TRCM Fund) acquired BetterHealthcare to expand patient access across its national physical therapy and rehabilitation network.
Roughly $12.4M in total, including a $5M Series A backed by the Hospital for Special Surgery and 5Lion Ventures, plus a later $1.5M round in 2023.
Physical therapy and rehabilitation clinics, multi-site healthcare providers and their patients; the scheduling platform has been used across 1,000+ facilities.
Sources: betterhealthcare.co · Crain's New York · MobiHealthNews · HSS News · PRWeb (HealthBus) · MedCity News · Dialog Health · TheOrg