Practice Mate

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.

Pros

I like that this is a web based program and not a server software your computer has to harbor. Its low in cost in comparison to other clearhouses.

Cons

patient inability to schedule online is not great, and it takes a lot of clicks to do simple tasks.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Practice Mate

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.

Pros

The scheduler was easy to use. Reading and writing notes was easy

Cons

Billing was difficult and lengthy. Did not have a place for authorizations etc.

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.