What are Practice Mate users saying about the software?

OFFICE ALLY, a comprehensive medical practice solution

Practice mate is great, we have used it in our medical practice for over 10 years.

Pros

Office ally is great because the practice mate is free. They will charge you nominal rates if you use some of the extra features like submitting claims, EHR, billing invoices, and a number of services that may be beneficial to a variety of different practices. Also their customer service is excellent, as well as their tutorial videos and they offer training one on one.

Cons

There are some things that could be improved on the software, but they are always improving and upgrading the software.

Great for Single Provider Practice

Pros

For a small, single provider mental health practice, this software makes billing much simpler. Entering demographics and billing is easy. Most clients are seen for the same procedure and diagnosis each time, I can template my charge entry to have these items automatically fill in at each visit. Easy to view and resubmit the claims that are sent. Can create pop-up notes when accessing certain areas of a patient (scheduling, demographics, etc). Can electronically post EOB's if setup to receive and process the insurance's file. Cannot beat the cost (or lack of cost) for using this software.

Cons

The Accounts Receivable can be challenging at times. Cannot reverse payments/adjustments on an account with a negative transaction, must delete these out, which is a nightmare for tracking or auditing. If the EOB wasn't posted by the system, have to manually search for the patient by looking at each EOB for that insurance.

Most serious thing to consider when starting with Office Ally/Practice Mate as a Mental Health Professional

Pros

I've used Office Ally for over 10 years, and in the early years it has worked very well for me, however, if I knew what I know about Office Ally now, I would not have started using it.

Cons

In the last several years, there have been more mistakes made by practice mate, claims that appear to have been submitted that were not. Fortunately, the Office Ally Tech support is usually very helpful when I call them, although in this case of some claims not going through, that issue has still not been resolved. The biggest issue however, that I would urge users of Practice Mate to consider, is if you use this program to write notes, at some point in time, if you ever want to stop using Practice Mate, you will not have easy access to these notes. I was told that there is no easy way of downloading or printing these notes. You have to go into each session, and cut and paste each note onto another document. If you don't want to go through this trouble, and for me it would be thousands of notes I would have to cut and paste, it effectively locks you into using Practice Mate, and almost impossible to shift over to another billing software program. You can export patient demographic information to other programs, but notes cannot be exported. If I had known this when I started with Office Ally, I would not have started. Hopefully Office Ally will fix this problem which could easily dissuade users from wanting to sign on.

simple fixes could make a world of difference

Our experience with other softwares have been AWFUL so this one has been a blessing. I feel that there are seemingly minor adjustments that could be addressed that would make this DREAMY. If only I could get someone to hear me!!!

Pros

I love that we can color code our schedules to differentiate b/w OT/ST

Cons

Needed fixes: Make daily schedule show only therapists working that day visible; Allow schedule to drag L/R for view of all treating therapists that entire day at once

Office Ally for Group Practices

It's a vast improvement over other services we've used. We don't use all the features available as some are not as cost efficient for smaller client populations. It has eased many of our processes, such as insurance eligibility and billing.

Pros

It's easy to learn and navigate for clinicians responsible for scheduling their own clients or for administrative staff to coordinate between clinicians and clients.

Cons

Sometimes the system is a bit slow to respond to commands and sometimes a user needs to go all the way through a process again vs using the back button to enter a new search.

You get what you pay for.

It's okay, works decent for small practices, I use it for my billing business of over 30 individual providers.

Pros

It's cheap and I have been using it for years so I know how to get around in it. Although it is not as cheap as it used to be and I am contemplating moving to a different system due to the expense growing. For what I pay monthly, I could be on a much better system.

Cons

Clumsy features. Auto posting is not great. Would love to see the visit, the subsequent claim, the eob all in the patient file. The aging report is horrendous. The collection report is closer but still a mess.

Works great, very inexpensive

Office Ally provides great customer service. Their tools are easy to use and either free or inexpensive. Highly recommend!

Pros

I use EHR 24/7 along with Practice Mate. The systems talk to each other and make coding and billing easy. We use a billing company, and they submit the claims and follow things through to the end for us. It's a very simple process. With Practice Mate, you can bill participating and non-participating providers through their system, and it's all free! The only time you have to pay is if more than half of your submitted claims for the month are non-participating, but even then it only costs $35 for the month, regardless of how many claims are submitted. It's a great deal.

Cons

We are still pretty new to the system, but to this point we haven't had any problems. I'm excited to get things rolling.

Constant Server Issues

Office Ally really needs to add and upgrade servers to meet the demands of its customers.

Pros

Low cost and intuitive system with features including interfaces with labs and imaging. Easy to use scheduling and EMR.

Cons

Consistently slow, and often completely unresponsive for long periods of time throughout the day. At peak times, the system experiences even more of a slow down.

Nice but limited!

Pros

Price.They provide a clearinghouse.A one stop for everything needed.Training readily available.

Cons

Functionality/ Limitations. Customization's for superbil and more.. Accounting for payments.. Flowing from one section to another. Eligibility checks .Patient data profile.

Not Designed For Mental Health

I found it somewhat awkward in design.

Pros

It provides an efficient clearing house for billing. The technical staff does attempt to assist your needs.

Cons

This software is not suited for mental health documentation. It is designed for medical offices. It lacks flexibility.

Practice Mate-Great for the smaller clinic

I love this program. Easy to learn and use. Multiple people can use it at once. Web based and can be used remotely. Customer service is knowledgeable but long wait times . I would recommend for clinics with 1-4 providers.

Pros

My familiarity with the product. Been using it for almost 20 years. It is very user friendly, easy to navigate and can be used by more than one person at at time. Auto posting feature is sufficient. Claims scrubber helps to create clean claims. No cost for support staff user accounts

Cons

Statement feature is decent except the way the statements are formatted is only semi professional, only in Black and White and no lines to separate visits.

Good Value

If you are a smaller practice, this should work good for you especially with the low price.

Pros

Does all your billing and scheduling. Very rarely have issues with denied claims. Catches mistakes we make before being sent out. Low cost. Does phone, text, and email reminders.

Cons

Can't manually send out text reminders. Can't link reminder system to a phone number, uses a random phone number. A little bit of a learning curve and sometimes slow loading pages. System can't hold large files. Only will show 100 patients, have to deactivate patients to see the full list. The program needs work, but they have been updating it.

Fantastic Calendaring and connection to Office Ally for insurance processing

Pros

I have used this service for nearly 8 years and have loved it for the calendar and insurance processing for insurance claims for my patients and clients.

Cons

They recently changed to charge for certain insurance companies an extra fee which has made the service more expensive than it was for the original 7 years. I am considering moving all this over to TherapyNotes to submit my insurance claims because I am a small practice.

Super ease and fast do to our billing.

Will continue billing though Practice Mate, we love it for our office...gets claims our fast and payment to us fast

Pros

How everything can be saved for billing and makes it go so much smoother, easy to add patients and easy to submit claims. Claims are processed very quickly!

Cons

Sometimes the billing shows a claim went successfully through, but then the insurance claim will say they never received a claim for a particular date of service. Has happened a lot.

Highly Recommend!

It was easy to set up and it's been a breeze to use. Any time I need help I am able to get a person on the phone in no time.

Pros

I've been using Practice Mate for many years, since I quit paying somebody to do my billing for me. It keeps track of everything

Cons

I don't have any complaints, I use this for billing insurance, patient information and billing patients.

Avoid this product

Regrettable.

Pros

Offers useful functions for accounting, billing, etc. if you don't plan to use the patient portal.

Cons

Their patient portal, Patient Ally, is AWFUL and I don't recommend it. Be prepared to deal with lots of bugs and customer service that just gives you the run around. The Upcoming Appointments feature of the portal does not work at all anymore. We've called several times to fix it over the last 6 months, and they just say "We are working on it" and refuse to give an estimated time to fix it. When we've expressed displeasure about this, we were ignored. We lose business because patients check their upcoming appointments tab and see they have nothing scheduled, even though they are in our schedules. Office Ally just doesn't care either so we will be looking for another solution. There are also plenty other bugs. For example, patients can sometimes request appointment slots that are already full, leading to double-booking. This is not because someone was scheduled in the time between the appointment request and confirmation. It is purely a software bug. The time it takes to resolve these issues with support is lengthy, and often the errors are never fully resolved. A fairly large chunk of our patients have trouble using it, and completing the on-boarding enrollment. We also had a worrisome customer service experience with their partner for integrated credit card processing, so we had to use a separate processor.

Medisoft scheduling review

Overall a solid product. Recommended.

Pros

I like that it's easy to customize your patient schedule with several views (daily, weekly, monthly) and you can add multiple columns per day to clarify patient visits among several providers.

Cons

I have had a several issues where the program freezes and crashes my computer, but I'm not sure if that's a hardware or software issue.

Amazing billing set up

Pros

It's real easy to do billing here. Everything is well organized and I love how it connects to EHR. It makes it easy to look up patients information and uploads without having to switch over to EHR.

Cons

Sometimes I still get lost here. A better layout for all the tabs and functions could be implemented, but the way it is right now isn't too bad.

Great deal in therapy software

Pros

I like the ease of filing insurance, keeping up with client information and the reminder service. It was been a huge help that didn't hurt our bottom line.

Cons

Getting charged for an excess of Claims for a particular insurance provider. The software isn't always smooth to operate. It seems a little dated.

Great Program!

Pros

Access To help and software is very intuitive. Overall it's a great program with many great features.

Cons

Billing portion is not so great. And prescribing medication is not an option. I had many problems with checking eligibility as well.

Good Software

Overall this is good software. Just a few things I would change to make it much better.

Pros

Overall I think this is a good EMR and Billing Software. I like the fact that you can upload multiple documents at once and entering patient visits and claims are very easy.

Cons

I’m not thrilled with the Billing side of the software. You have to sign into the Service section the send corrected claims and etc. I think we should be able to do it all in Practice Mate.

Great Software for starting out

We have been using this for the past 2 years. It is extremely user friendly and great for a start up practice that is trying to save time and money.

Nice little program

It a decent experience. I need more time on it. But for the price, it certainly gets the job done. The support is really good. It just doesn't have all the bells and whistles but they are adding more. i would take a look at it with questions if you know what you are looking for. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Pros

I love that it is almost free. We pay $35 for the clearing house and the PM. Its another $29.95 per doc for the EHR.

Cons

It is somewhat confusing. I feel like I go in circles. But I may not have used it enough. It does work though to get claims out and organize payments and rports'

Office ally LOVE !

Pros

very easy to use - if not support is right around the corner ! - Very detailed

Cons

I have had times logging in that were tough when working remotely - but could be a ME problem !

Good software for a small medical office

Pros

I like that this is a one stop shop for my small practice. It is great to be able to schedule, bill, take payments, make appointments and keep charts in one spot!

Cons

I don't like that there are a limit amount of notes. It was also a bit of a learning curve to get up and running.