Practice Mate

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.

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

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

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.

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.