Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Testing Psychologist Podcast, the podcast where we talk all about the business and practice of psychological and neuropsychological assessment. I’m your host, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, licensed psychologist, group practice owner, and private practice coach.
This episode is brought to you by PAR. The Feifer Assessment of Writing examines why students may struggle with writing. The FAW and the FAW screening form are available on PARiConnect – PAR’s online assessment platform. Learn more at parinc.com/faw.
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Testing Psychologist Podcast. Today is another EHR review. And this is a good one. Today I’m talking about IntakeQ, which a lot of you may have heard of. IntakeQ has been around for a few years primarily as a paperwork system. So they started as a piece of software that would let you send and receive paperwork securely. And a lot of practices have used it as such over the years.
We use it as such to send our paperwork back and forth. But over the years, IntakeQ has also built out a number of pretty robust features to really compete as a full-featured EHR. So I am talking through the pros and cons. As with all the EHR reviews, the best information is really contained in the accompanying YouTube video.
That video is about 35 or 40 minutes long. And it’s linked in the show notes and on the blog post. So definitely go and check that out to really get a sense of what IntakeQ looks like. I should also mention that there’s a dedicated Facebook group for mental health practitioners who are using IntakeQ as an EHR. So, there are some great resources in there as well.
Before we get into the review, I want to invite any beginner practice owners out there who are planning to launch or just launched their practice to consider the beginner practice mastermind group. This is a group that is going to start in early March. A couple of months, not a month and a half. It’s a group coaching experience where you’ll join five or six other psychologists who are launching or have just launched their testing practices. And the idea is that we provide support and accountability. And I, as a facilitator, provide coaching around getting your practice started and doing so in a way that makes sense for you financially, making sure it’s efficient, making sure you’re using your time wisely, and not getting into any trouble with legal stuff, business stuff, anything in that realm.
So if you have it on your plate to launch your practice in 2021, or want to really dial in a practice that you’ve already launched, this might be for you. You can get more information at thetestingpsychologist.com/beginner.
All right, let’s jump into the review of IntakeQ.
Okay, here we are. Let’s get right to it with IntakeQ.
Now, these review episodes tend to be pretty short and sweet. Like I said, the real information is contained in the YouTube video. So definitely check that out. But here’s the summary of my review of IntakeQ.
Overall, I liked IntakeQ quite a bit. So, here are some things that went really well with IntakeQ. First of all, just basics. They do have a free trial. It’s only 14 days, but they do a free trial with no credit card required. Their pricing is competitive. It’s priced at $59.95 a month for a full-featured EHR.
Now, if you just wanted to use it for paperwork which is really their bread and butter, it is only $49.95 a month, but I think it’s worth it to upgrade to the $59.95 to get all those full-featured EHR features. That’s the pricing. It is competitive with other EHRs.
So I have to say right off the bat, like I mentioned in the intro, this EHR actually started as a paperwork system and they have completely nailed that aspect of the practice. So, this is that whole client portal, getting documents back and forth. They really crushed it. Their system of creating and sending and receiving paperwork securely is fantastic. I can’t say enough about that.
It allows you to customize your forms or you can upload your existing forms and they’ll turn them into electronic forms for you for a very, very nominal fee. And they’ll do it quickly within three business days. So, lots of options to create and send forms.
Now, with non-form, like more EHR features, they extend some of that customizability to appointment notes. So you can easily create very customized notes for your testing appointments. You have a lot of control over the format. And since they are kind of a form-based software, we have even gone so far as to create public domain questionnaires and put them into the system so we can send questionnaires via IntakeQ. And you can even set them up where IntakeQ will score the questionnaires. There’s a way to do that. So, it scores that automatically and you get it back from the client securely. That’s a really cool feature.
A really small thing that I noticed that jumped out I haven’t seen in any EHR so far is the option to have the system charge a client credit card automatically on the day of the appointment. I have not seen that before. That was really cool.
Just aesthetically speaking, I really appreciated the aesthetics. I don’t know what it is about this sort of sky blue or kind of cornflower blue color, there’s got to be research out there, but it seems like this is the color that every EHR is choosing as their main color.
So that’s on full display here on IntakeQ as well. But they mix in some orange and some green as well. It definitely looks nice. Now, as far as the testing features. I always think about how easy it is to set up appointments into our billing codes and bill for appointments, particularly with the add-ons.
And so that process was relatively easy. It was a little bit hard to find where to enter CPT codes and how to get those in the system, but once they were in there, it was relatively easy on the note to specify units and charges and add-on codes. Once we got it set up, it was relatively easy. I’ve seen much worse, certainly.
Another thing that is great about IntakeQ is that it has really nice reporting options by which I mean revenue reports are broken down by clinician and service and date range, all that stuff. That’s pretty standard. But one of the really cool things about IntakeQ is that you can export the data that you get from the questionnaires.
So if you’re in a practice that values research or you are trying to get some research off the ground, you can export that data from the questionnaire in terms of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, all those demographic factors. You can get a report on any question that is on your forms. That was really cool. I haven’t seen that before, and I could see that coming in really handy, especially for testing folks who might be more keyed into research.
Another aspect of IntakeQ that I really like is that it provides a number of integrations with other software programs. Right off the bat, it has API support. That may not mean much to a lot of you, but basically what that means is that IntakeQ is an open software where if you have the tech knowhow or the interest in hiring someone, they can write software or a program or whatever to connect into IntakeQ and pull data from it. That is not the case with a lot of the EHRs which are pretty closed to outside systems.
Related to that there are a lot of integrations with IntakeQ. So they integrate really well with Google drive. That’s one of our favorite features. IntakeQ will automatically create a client folder and upload their intake forms to our Google drive when the client submits the forms, that’s pretty cool. But they also have a lot of other integrations. They have an integration with Zoom, with Zapier, with Sr fax. So you can fax documents directly from IntakeQ. That’s a cool little feature.
There are a number of pros with IntakeQ. It has a lot going for it, that’s for sure. And one of the things that really jumped out was the ability to create custom testing notes. That’s something that a lot of the EHR struggles with. Let’s take a quick break to hear from our featured partner.
The Feifer Assessment of Writing or FAW is a comprehensive test of written expression that examines why students may struggle with writing. It joins the FAR and the FAM to complete the Feifer Family of Diagnostic Achievement Test Batteries, all of which examined subtypes of learning disabilities using a brain-behavior perspective.
The FAW can identify the possibility of dysgraphia as well as the specific subtype. Also available is the FAW screening form which can be completed in 20 minutes or less. Both the FAW and the FAW screening form are available on PARiConnect – PAR’s online assessment platform allowing you to get results even faster. Learn more at parinc.com/faw.
All right, let’s get back to the podcast.
Now, as far as the things that did not go well with IntakeQ, we can talk through those. There is not a ton, but they are noteworthy. Like some other EHR that I have reviewed, there are very few demographic choices. This jumps out particularly with gender identity and sexual orientation. Those kinds of questions. There’s not a lot to let people choose. Oh, sorry, there aren’t a lot of options to enter the system. Now, you can, of course, put all the options that you want on the questionnaires that you develop and send out. But as far as actually putting client information in the system, those don’t really exist.
The other piece and this is something that’s come up across several EHRs, is that the navigation was a little tough. I was able to get around pretty well, but I did run into some bumps when 1) I couldn’t figure out how to assign a diagnosis to an appointment or to a client. And I didn’t want to spend the time on the review to stretch it out any further to figure that out but it’s not super intuitive. It’s not like it just gives you the option on a note. Unless you put that field in the note, it doesn’t just give you an option to assign a diagnosis to an appointment or to a client.
The other thing, it wasn’t super clear to me how to write notes without clicking on each individual appointment. There is a task list in IntakeQ, but I couldn’t get it to populate with my appointment notes. And that could have been me doing something wrong as a beginner, but it wasn’t, again, super intuitive.
The same thing applied to submitting claims.It looked like the easiest way I could find was to just click on each individual appointment and submit the claims that way. That wasn’t super smooth.
Related to the navigation, there are a lot of main menus, first of all. And then there are a lot of sub-menus within those main menus. And then paired with the fact that they don’t really do a walkthrough at the beginning to get everything set up for your practice, it can get a little bit overwhelming. And you’ll see this if you look on the YouTube video that I could’ve just kept clicking through menu after menu to keep filling in information.
It would take, I would guess maybe an hour, in the beginning, to get everything set up, and then you’d be ready to roll. But there was a lot to click through just to get your practice set up. And it wasn’t always super clear. I feel like they could have maybe condensed some of those menus together, But generally speaking, the overall verdict with IntakeQ is that it is definitely a possibility to use this EHR as a testing psychologist.
I think as I said, it would take some time to set it up, but from that point forward, I think it would operate pretty well. There are a lot of pros, if nothing else, the paperwork feature is a huge draw and you can make the rest work for you if paperwork is super important. But there are plenty of other things to get on board with as well.
And my impression and perception of IntakeQ are that they are just pouring research and money into developing these EHR features. They’ve recognized that there’s definitely a market for an EHR that’s built around the paperwork system and they are taking full advantage of that.
My guess is that the features are just going to get better and better. I would say it’s definitely a possibility. I would keep that in the running for an EHR if you’re a testing psychologist, just depending on your needs.
Like I said, the YouTube video is linked in the show notes. There’s also a link of course, to IntakeQ and there’s a nice list of the pros and cons that I’ve discussed.
So make sure to check those out. And like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, if you’re a beginner practice owner who has just launched or is hoping to launch a practice in 2021, I would invite you to check out the testing psychologist, beginner practice mastermind group. And this was a group coaching experience just for folks who are launching their practices.
It is about five months long. It’s 10 sessions. It’s a group coaching experience where we will hold you accountable and give you a cohort of folks to go through this process with. So you’re not alone just to make sure that you are crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s and setting up your practice to work for you instead of the other way around. So if that sounds interesting, check it out at thetestingpsychologists.com/beginner and you can schedule a pre-group call there.
As always, thank you for listening. This episode is number five out of six in the EHR review series. I will be concluding the series next week with a dark horse EHR. That is new on the scene called Jane. Hearing good things about it. So I’m eager to check that out and if you don’t want to miss an episode we do a clinical and a business episode each week. If you don’t want to miss those, subscribe to the podcast and whatever podcast player you might be listening in.
Always a pleasure y’all. Hope everybody’s doing well. And I will catch you next week.
The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist’s website is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
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