Orva vs. Sara Health
Both Orva and Sara Health support Remote Therapeutic Monitoring. The question is not whether you can “turn on RTM.” The question is whether patients actually engage in a way that improves outcomes, and whether your staff can keep the program running without friction. This comparison focuses on the two biggest failure modes in RTM programs: patient experience that feels like spam, and workflows that look integrated but break under pressure.
What Sara Health Is
Sara Health is built around daily SMS outreach. Patients receive automated text prompts and respond by texting back. Those interactions are then used to support monitoring documentation. It is a simple model on paper because there is no app to download.
Sara also markets “EMR integration” through a Chrome extension. This workflow is powered through Arrow Health’s ArrowBridge platform, which is an overlay layer that runs in the browser. It can look like the tool is inside the EMR during a demo, but in practice it is an extension sitting on top of a web interface.
The implications are operational. Overlays can work, but they introduce more failure points and more dependency on third party update cycles. That matters because the moment a clinician loses trust in the workflow, usage drops immediately.
What Orva Is
Orva is a full patient engagement platform built specifically for outpatient PT and orthopedic clinics. It combines structured home exercise programs, patient reported outcomes, progress visibility, and secure communication, with a purpose built RTM billing engine that tracks eligibility automatically.
Orva is designed around the reality of clinic operations. The most important moment is the visit itself. That is when staff can set up a patient correctly, on the patient’s actual device, and confirm everything works. Orva makes this easy, fast, and repeatable.
Orva tracks RTM code eligibility across 98975, 98985, 98977, 98979, 98980, and 98981 with real time visibility that billers and clinicians can rely on.
The biggest difference is onboarding in clinic
Most RTM programs do not fail because clinics “do not understand RTM.” They fail because onboarding is inconsistent. If setup is even slightly annoying, it does not happen for every patient, every time.
Orva is built to be installed and activated in clinic on the patient’s device, without turning the visit into a tech support session. Staff should not have to ask patients to remember App Store credentials, search their email, or “do it later at home.”
- Setup happens when motivation is highest, while the patient is in front of you.
- Staff can confirm login and notifications immediately, preventing silent drop off.
- Fewer conversion cliffs, because you remove Apple ID and password friction from the process.
The most expensive failure mode in RTM is “we signed up the patient, but they never really got going.” Orva is designed to eliminate that gap.
Why SMS-first engagement often feels spammy
“Spammy” does not mean unethical. It means the patient recognizes a pattern that feels automated and repetitive. A daily SMS stream can quickly start to resemble marketing texts, especially when prompts look similar day after day and do not produce a clear payoff for the patient.
SMS is a great channel for occasional nudges. It is a fragile channel for being the entire product. If the experience is mostly “reply to this prompt,” it often creates compliance without creating motivation.
When patients feel like they are being monitored rather than helped, you see predictable outcomes: replies become low quality, opt outs rise, and the program requires more staff chasing to stay alive.
- Repetition is the killer. Similar prompts train patients to ignore the thread.
- There is no progress loop. Patients do not see something improving because they replied.
- It feels impersonal. Patients do not feel like a clinician is present, even if clinicians review logs later.
Platform Comparison
A straightforward comparison
98979, 98980, 98981
What to ask Sara Health in a demo
If you are evaluating Sara Health, do not evaluate the concept. Evaluate the day to day reality. Ask to see the actual message stream a patient receives over a month for a common diagnosis. Then ask how many patients opt out, how quickly, and what the fallback plan is when a patient stops responding.
For the extension, ask to see it inside your exact EMR, on your exact browser setup, with a real workflow. If the vendor cannot show it in your environment, you should assume the demo is the best case, not the average case.
If a workflow breaks one day out of twenty, it will break on the busiest day of the month, and staff will stop trusting it.
What to ask Orva in a demo
Ask to see in-clinic onboarding on a real patient device. The point is not that the app is attractive. The point is that staff can set it up fast, confirm it works, and move on.
Then ask to see a live billing report from a real month. You should be able to understand eligibility status and billable codes instantly, without a training session.
Ready to See Orva?
We can walk you through in-clinic setup on a patient device, show the patient experience over two weeks, and share a live billing report so you can evaluate the output before you commit.
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