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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.