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.

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

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'

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.