Orva vs. MedBridge: Choosing the Right RTM Platform for Your PT or Orthopedic Clinic

What MedBridge Is Built For

MedBridge built its reputation on continuing education. Their CEU library is genuinely best in class, and it remains the core of what they sell. RTM is part of their broader Care platform, bundled alongside HEP, patient-reported outcomes, and care pathways in their Care Elite plan.

That bundling is a real advantage if your organization is already on MedBridge and wants to consolidate. It also means RTM is one module within a platform designed primarily around clinician education and standardized care delivery, not a system built from the ground up to maximize RTM enrollment, daily patient engagement, and billing compliance.

MedBridge provides an RTM dashboard, an integrated timer for tracking management time toward 98980 and 98981, and guidance on billing documentation. They publish substantial educational content on RTM codes and requirements, which is useful for clinics still learning the landscape.

Their pricing is structured as a per-seat annual fee plus a per-episode charge for RTM usage.

What Orva Is

Orva is a full patient engagement platform built specifically for outpatient PT and orthopedic clinics. That means HEP, patient-reported outcome surveys, and secure messaging — alongside the most capable RTM billing engine available. Everything in one place, designed around how these clinics actually operate.

The RTM billing side is where Orva is most differentiated from MedBridge. The 30-day device period and calendar month management cycles run on different timelines, and the overlap creates billing complexity that most platforms leave to the clinic to manage manually. Orva internalizes that complexity. Clinicians and billers see in real time which patients qualify, which of the six codes are billable today, and what still needs to happen before each billing window closes.

The six codes Orva tracks automatically: 98975, 98985, 98977, 98979, 98980, and 98981.

On the patient side, Orva's mobile experience was built to the standard of consumer apps, not clinical software. The distinction matters because RTM revenue only exists when patients engage consistently. In active Orva clinics, patient engagement runs above 90%. That is not downloads — that is patients actively interacting and qualifying for billing.

Beyond the platform, Orva actively manages RTM billing for its clinic partners at no additional cost — handling documentation, generating billing reports, and submitting claims on your behalf. This is not something MedBridge offers. Orva's pricing is per patient, and you only pay for patients who qualify. No per-seat fees, no implementation costs.

Who Should Choose MedBridge

MedBridge makes sense if your organization is already using their CEU platform and wants RTM without adding another vendor. If clinician education and outcomes are priorities alongside RTM, and you want them managed in one place, their Care Elite bundle is worth evaluating seriously.

They have a mature platform and a large support ecosystem. For organizations where RTM is one component of a broader standardized care program, MedBridge is a reasonable fit.

Who Should Choose Orva

Orva is the stronger fit if you want a complete patient engagement platform — HEP, outcomes, secure messaging, and RTM — where all of it is designed around the clinical workflows of outpatient PT and orthopedic practices, not bolted together from a CEU company's product suite.

The clinics that get the most out of Orva tend to share a few things: they are independent or founder-led practices with 3 to 40 therapists, they care deeply about patient experience, and many of them tried RTM before with a different platform and were disappointed. What they needed was not just a billing tool — they needed a platform that keeps patients engaged between visits, generates consistent qualifying data, and handles the billing cycle without adding work to an already full clinical day. That is what Orva is built to do. And because Orva actively manages billing for its clinic partners at no extra cost, it stays that way.

The Question Worth Asking Any Vendor

Before committing to any RTM platform, ask to see a live billing report. Not a demo of the dashboard. An actual report showing patient eligibility status, qualifying days, and billable codes for a real month. That document will tell you more about how a platform handles RTM complexity than any sales presentation.