Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Jeremy Sharp. Today, I am here with Brad Pliner. Brad is the CEO and co-founder of TherapyNotes, which is one of the most popular mental health EHRs that are out there these days.
I’m super excited to have Brad here on the podcast because, one, I have been with TherapyNotes for years. It seems like forever ago. They were the only ones I signed up with. I was very deliberate about that because of my interest in testing and the fact that TherapyNotes was testing-friendly out of the [00:01:00] box. So this is exciting for me to be able to talk with Brad and have him talk with y’all about the whole process behind TherapyNotes and how it can be helpful, and specifically helpful for testing folks.
So Brad, welcome to the podcast.
Brad: Hi Jeremy, thanks a lot for having me.
Dr. Sharp: Of course. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Like I said, we can dive right into it, you are a pretty important person in the mental health world these days given the popularity of TherapyNotes and the amount that I hear about it or questions I get about it. So I’m grateful for your time and excited to talk with you.
Brad: It’s been very exciting since we launched TherapyNotes. The feedback and the demand have been overwhelming. It’s been wonderful.
Dr. Sharp: That’s fantastic. This is totally out of sequence, but I got to ask, did you ever think that it was going to grow [00:02:00] as quickly as it did when you first started?
Brad: I don’t know. I didn’t know what I didn’t know what to expect. We knew we had a great product and a great idea. At the time, there was no competition, there was no good web-based solution for what we wanted to do.
I was pretty optimistic, which is why we put a lot behind it, but no, I can’t say that I was going to expect this level of success. We’re doing very well.
Dr. Sharp: That’s fantastic. First of all, congratulations on that. I know I’ve seen y’all’s posts on Facebook lately that you continue to grow. I know from a business perspective, that’s really exciting. So congratulations.
Brad: Thank you. We just moved into our new office building. We had run out of space and now we’re at about 50 employees. We’re looking to build the team up closer to 100 over the next year or so. As quickly as possible, we’re hiring people.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s wonderful. [00:03:00] A nice side note too, gosh, if any of the testing folks out there who are listening have spouses or relatives who are in the coding, maybe I’ll hook y’all up.
Brad: Absolutely.
Dr. Sharp: Let’s get into it. I’m curious, I know maybe just a bit about your origin story, but could you talk about how you even came up with the idea for a mental health EHR?
Brad: Sure. My wife is a psychologist and in fact does testing and therapy. I helped her start her own practice and it was growing. She had, at the time, maybe about six clinicians working for her. She needed an EMR and there was nothing out there that met our needs.
We looked at it. We didn’t start this off saying, hey, I’ll build you something. It started with, we looked at everything out there and we couldn’t find anything we were happy with. Finally, because my background, I have a web development company as well, we said, let’s build you something.
She was using that for about two [00:04:00] years before we finally decided, you know what, it’s time, let’s make it a commercial product. It took another two years of development because we overhauled it because we needed to make it ready for the masses so that thousands of people could use it instead of six. And then we launched it and immediately had wonderful demand for it. It grew very quickly.
We also launched it with very minimal features. When we first launched, we didn’t have any billing features. We just wanted to get it out there with the scheduling, the notes, and a place to keep track of your appointments and so forth.
Once we launched, then we added billing, electronic claims, appointment reminders, and so forth. We’ve been doing that based on demand and feedback from our customers. So my wife started us off and then from there, the floodgates were open of what do thousands of other people think we should be doing? And that’s how we decide what to do next.
Dr. Sharp: I like that. It’s like [00:05:00] crowdsourcing your software development, I guess.
Brad: Absolutely.
Dr. Sharp: That’s good. Just hearing you say that, it sounds like your wife gets a lot of credit in this whole process because I feel like it was pretty user-friendly right out of the box.
Brad: My wife designed the note templates. I did a lot of interviewing with her to understand her workflow, which is why when you schedule an appointment and ask you what type of appointment it’s going to be, it will then tell you what kind of note should you do, when should you update treatment plans, when should you notify the PCP that a diagnosis changed, and so forth?
A lot of interaction between my wife and I, as well as other clinicians in her practice and anyone that we could get to answer some questions, but my wife was instrumental in building the note templates in particular.
Dr. Sharp: I hear that. It’s nice, I would imagine, to have someone that close to do your beta testing, right?
Brad: Absolutely. To this day, her practice uses a version of [00:06:00] TherapyNotes, one version newer than the rest of the world. They know how it’s working and then once we know it’s acceptable, then we move it to the next stage, which is then when you and the rest of our customers will get it.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. Oh, that’s pretty cool. That’s a nice synergy marriage-wise, at least in that regard, totally good. So that sounds good. I am curious, it sounds like she played a pretty big role in the process and others in her practice. Were there other ways that you developed TherapyNotes? Research or interviews with other practitioners or how’d you continue to grow it and refine it?
Brad: Absolutely. First off, like I said, once we launched it, we got a lot of customer feedback, but we never take what a customer says by that word alone, we will then research it. We’re going to go online. We’re going to go directly to the source, whether it’s a, let’s say, [00:07:00] Medicare regulation or HIPAA regulation, we’ll talk to our attorneys. We have billing consultants that we work with.
So we do a lot of research in that regard just to make sure we’re not taking a misstep. We always make sure that we’re doing the right thing. We also analyze all the feedback that comes in and say, okay, we’re getting a lot of overwhelming feedback that this might not be quite right. We’ll prioritize that as well. There’s a lot of moving parts to make sure that we’re getting everything right.
We don’t do anything quicker than we need to. In other words, we want to make sure we get it right. We’re not going to release a feature and then realize we went the wrong direction. This is terrible. We’re helping our customers be HIPAA compliant, be secure that they’re doing their notes in a way that if they were to get audited, that they’d be in good shape. So we are very careful about any changes that we make that could impact in particular, those [00:08:00] items.
Dr. Sharp: That’s good to hear. I get a lot of questions from folks around that in terms of transitioning to an EHR, is it secure? How do I know that it’s not going to get lost? What if I lose my computer? The questions just run the gamut.
Could you speak maybe even in very basic terms of maybe the advantages of an EHR over keeping paper notes? When you say secure, what does that mean? Where does it live and all of that kind of stuff?
Brad: Absolutely. First off, in terms of security, all of your records are stored on our servers and not on your computer. So if someone breaks in your office and steals your computer or manages to remotely hack your computer, your computer is not part of the equation. Your computer is the gateway or the means to connect to TherapyNotes.
So we’re securing all your data behind levels of [00:09:00] firewalls, redundancy, backups and so forth. We certainly never want your data to be lost or compromised or breached in any way. If they’re on your computer, there’s a better chance of those types of circumstances because you are now more responsible for the security, the backups and so forth.
You don’t have a full IT department. Most of our customers are very small organizations, usually 1 or 2 people, and they don’t have an IT department. We’re the IT resource for our customers.
Obviously, that’s just one reason to use an EHR. The others are electronic scheduling, electronic notes. We have a place where you can upload your reports. For example, as a testing psychologist, you can upload all of those finished reports or even scan in the data and upload that so that you don’t have stacks and stacks of papers in boxes or filing cabinets.
There’s a lot of reasons to have EHR. Oh, of course, [00:10:00] e-streamlined billing. One in particular, the appointment reminder feature, if you allocate three hours to do an evaluation for a patient, you want to make sure they show up. So the appointment reminders feature automatically sends them a text, an email, or a phone call, or more than one of those things.
Let’s say they get an email two days before and then a text the day before, and that’s one of our settings. That way, it’s more likely that they’re going to show up, which is obviously really important. So there’s a lot of reasons to use an EHR.
Dr. Sharp: I can personally speak for the appointment reminder feature. That’s been a game-changer for us. It’s been years now since we implemented it, but it still is awesome. We work with a lot of adolescent clients and it seems like they only text. And so to be able to have that available is great.
Brad: Terrific.
Dr. Sharp: Totally shows up. Let me ask one more question with that, [00:11:00] I think people have the suspicion of data in the cloud and not knowing where it is or how to get it, is there any way for that to disappear or get lost or otherwise be unaccessible, are there any?
Brad: Our copies of your data, basically, your data is saved on our servers in redundant places. So our servers themselves have redundant hard drives and so forth. It means that the hard drive fails, it doesn’t impact anything because there’s other hard drives already with copies of it.
Then we have backups in multiple locations so it actually goes to another physical location outside of that data center entirely. So if that data center, for example, was the blow-up, we have all the data elsewhere. We have levels of redundancy so that no lost data should ever be a factor.
Unlike if you have all your reports in your paper and so forth in your office, if you have a flood or a fire or [00:12:00] theft or so forth, you don’t have multiple copies of those printed pieces of paper. So being electronic is certainly good.
As far as it being in the cloud, the cloud is this nebulous term that means I don’t have to think about it. It’s out there in the ether. Physically, it’s on a computer somewhere. It’s not magic. There’s a server somewhere. In our case, we own the servers, our primary data center. We physically own the servers, and then we have servers in our other location that it’s streaming backups to. They’re physically on servers that we’re protecting, as opposed to servers that are in your office, that then you would instead need to maintain.
Dr. Sharp: I know a little bit about this kind of stuff, but I’m even struck by how you talk about the redundancy and the fact that it’s not just multiple servers in one location, there’re different physical locations that the likelihood of your two server buildings [00:13:00] blowing up at the same time is pretty unlikely so it should be safe.
I think that goes a long way to ease people’s nerves a little bit. There’s something about being able to handle something in paper and know that it’s “real” but when you put it that way, it does live on a computer and in fact, lives on multiple computers in different places. That’s a good thing.
I’m curious about the testing-specific aspects of TherapyNotes. It sounds like your wife does testing and that was maybe a driver in developing, but I’m curious, did y’all have that as a specific focus as you were developing TherapyNotes from the beginning?
Brad: Sure. Like I said, we built it for my wife before it was even a commercial product. My wife, especially more so back then did a lot of testing. In fact, I helped her type those and we didn’t have a scantron. I would be the person who would type ABCD [00:14:00] as we typed them all in, but she would read them off to me. That was my job many years ago. I haven’t done that in a while.
Anyway, we had a psychological evaluation note template from day one. That’s always been there. It is a great way to track all the time that you spent on all the different measures that were performed. What’s the total time which it calculates for you? You put the diagnosis code and the patient information. It’s streamlined and integrated.
And then parallel to that, you would upload the finished report. So if you use a third-party testing product and you have a PDF file, you can then upload that. So the note and the PDF are right there next to each other in your list of documents. And then you don’t have to have any paper records. You don’t have to have files on your computer. As soon as you do the test, you upload that, and then your personal computer is clear of any patient information. So yes, on day one, we had the note template.
[00:15:00] We may have talked about this already, when you create the appointment, you specify if it’s an evaluation so it knows you need to do that type of note. It’s all streamlined and integrated from your scheduling the appointment to your to-do list telling you you need to do that note to then actually doing the note, which automatically pulls forward patient information, their diagnosis if you’ve already seen them in the past, and so forth. It will remember some of the measures that you do so that they’re available in pull-downs and so forth.Dr. Sharp: That’s a good thing to highlight just as a side note is that when you’re putting in the time for each test that you administer, there is a, well, I forget what you call that, but the memory where it recalls the tests you’ve done in the past and you can just select from a list so you don’t have to type it every single time for every note. Just one of those small things that makes a big difference.
Brad: We don’t ever want you to have to reenter information. [00:16:00] For example, it used to be, you would have one system for your medical records and another system for your billing. That’s very common. So you’re reentering all of that information, or if you go to the portal for your insurance company and you have to manually rekey, we never want you to do that TherapyNotes. So we’re always mindful of that.
These are good examples. When you’re on that note template, you can see from pulldowns, things that you’ve previously entered in those fields.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, super helpful. It sounds like your wife played a big role in designing this testing note template. Can you remember back then or if you’ve updated it, where else you looked for guidance, and in terms of what was required for a testing note, what important information might need to be on that?
Brad: You know what? I don’t know if our templates changed that much since my wife designed it. A good question. I can’t remember other than that field, what we just discussed, the memory feature where it [00:17:00] remembers how you filled out those fields in the past, that was not in the original version. I can’t remember anything else specific to that.
People have generally, right off the bat, have been very happy with that note template. I do though have a list of changes, I shouldn’t say changes but improvements that we will be adding hopefully this year for all the note templates, but there are some specifically for the psychological evaluation that makes it even easier.
For example, those pulldowns having even more suggestions right off the bat, because right now, the first time you use the evaluation note, it’s blank and then it learns from what you use, what measures have you done in the past? We want to start you off with some the more common ones.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, I see. Almost like a drop-down versus a self-populating or something.
Brad: Yeah, exactly. We want not only to [00:18:00] make it faster, but so that the first time you use it, it’s more intuitive of how to use these fields because it’s going to give you examples of what you might want to put in that field, even if you don’t use our options. And then once you do put in options, it will remember those moving forward.
Although, as you know, the note template is pretty intuitive off the bat. If you’re a psychologist that does testing, this note template will make a lot of sense to you.
Dr. Sharp: I always highlight that with people who I’m consulting with and they’re asking about an EHR that would be appropriate for testing. I mainly consult with people who are doing testing. That’s their main focus. And so I always talk about that, the fact that it hasn’t changed is really impressive because I feel like it was good to go, like I said, right out of the box.
It was almost uncanny, that’s why I asked that question is because it seems like it hits a lot of those important pieces that we’ll get audited for testing [00:19:00] appointments, like the time that you spend on each test and how much time has spent report writing.
There’s a box to justify why you’re doing testing or add additional comments about the measures that you’re using. There were little details where I thought they’ve really put some thought into this.
Brad: I’m going give a shout out to my wife because that’s all my wife. I’m all about the user interface. My wife designed that template. Like we’ve said, it hasn’t needed to change very much because it was spot on right from the beginning.
Dr. Sharp: Speaking of the user interface, I am curious about that. When I signed up, that was a big draw for me. I’d previously been using an EHR that was maybe functional but not pretty. I like things to be pretty. So the fact that it sounds like y’all put some energy into the UX or how it looks is super [00:20:00] important. Can you talk about that process and how you’ve figured out what it should look like?
Brad: Yeah, absolutely. My background is computer science. I got a master’s in computer science. I had a web development company right out of college. I was doing that for a long time before we built TherapyNotes so I have a lot of experience building user interfaces, and that’s just always been my passion.
I love a nice, clean, simple interface. I’m a big Apple guy. I like that mentality. You may notice from TherapyNotes, as user-friendly as it is and nice looking as it is, there’s minimal images, there’s minimal clutter. It’s all about what’s the actual information you need when you need it.
So we want a streamlined interface that’s not confusing. It’s intuitive. The first time you use it, it should be very simple. We’ve never printed a user manual. We do have a knowledge base now where people, if they need help, they can get more information. There’s no user [00:21:00] manual like it used to be back when you get a CD-ROM and install software.
When my wife was starting a practice and we needed that software, we looked at all those CD-ROMs and they came with manuals. That was the inspiration where we said, no, we need something that’s easy to use off the bat. In some ways, I like to compare it to Facebook. It’s easier to use in Facebook in a lot of ways. There’s different tabs with all the information you need right there.
The one area of the system that where we get the most support calls about are billing, but that’s nothing. I wish we could make billing easier. We’ve tried, we’ve made billing as easy as possible. One click and your claim is out.
Unfortunately, insurance billing is what it is. We’re doing everything we can to make it easy, but that’s where most of our support questions are going to come up. How do you do add-on codes and so forth where things get tricky?
TherapyNotes is a very capable system. What’s nice about it also is we limit showing you features that you don’t need. For example, if [00:22:00] you’re a single-user practice, if it sounds like a single clinician practice, you don’t need to see all the group features where you can assign patients to other clinicians and so forth, or the calendar, just shows you your calendar and not the whole practice’s calendar.
If you have billing access, then you see those features. If you don’t, then they’re not there. We want to streamline interface as much as possible. So it’s more about what you don’t see than what you do see. We want you to see as little as possible so that you can find what you’re looking for.
Dr. Sharp: I think that makes a lot of sense. And then the option to add all that extra information is there and pretty easily accessible as far as I’m concerned, but you don’t have to see it if you don’t want to.
Brad: A lot of emphasis went into understanding your needs as a psychologist, you have an appointment, how frequently? Is it a once-a-week appointment? I had to understand all of that so we could [00:23:00] design our to-do list feature and so forth.
The to-do list feature is great because you have a busy day of appointments if you have therapy clients and evaluations and so forth. At the end of the day, you need to know what notes didn’t I do. With TherapyNotes, you can’t forget to do a note because every appointment has a corresponding note and you work against that to-do list. So if you don’t have time to keep up with your notes throughout the day, it will be there for you.
Dr. Sharp: For folks like me where if it’s not right in front of my face, I’m going to forget about it, that’s pretty important. I’ve talked to a lot of folks too, who come from, let’s say, a community mental health agency or a college counseling center or even a hospital where they use more enterprise-grade EMRs and those have a reminder list and a to-do list. I was thrilled to find an EHR [00:24:00] that was like what I was used to in a college counseling center with that reminder list.
Brad: In fact, we’ve been working with a number of college counseling centers where university training clinics are using TherapyNotes in that environment so those students who are training to be psychologists, they can be using a real-world application so that when they start their practices, they’re ready to go.
And then they’re even using TherapyNotes in the classroom to teach how to do their notes, how to do a progress note or a psychological evaluation note, and so forth. They’re actually bringing TherapyNotes up on the screen.
I think one of the neatest things about all of this is realizing if you search in LinkedIn, how many people are putting TherapyNotes on their resume, to me, that floored me. That meant we made it.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that’s wild. You mean as a skill set that they have?
Brad: Exactly, they’re putting TherapyNotes as a skill set on their resume because they did billing at a practice or because [00:25:00] in their university training clinic, they may have learned it, or they simply used it as a psychologist in one of their prior jobs. To me, that’s amazing to the point now where it would be on your resume as a skill.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. I bet that’s surreal to see your company as a skill. That’s great. I know that’s helpful. I’ve been hiring folks here over the past, probably five to six months, I don’t know if it’s a major thing, but it’s definitely a huge plus if somebody says, yeah, I’ve used TherapyNotes before.
Brad: Absolutely.
Dr. Sharp: Related to that, I’ve talked about billing, especially insurance billing, to find billers out there who are TherapyNotes savvy or who require that you use TherapyNotes as your system, that is pretty telling as well.
Brad: Absolutely. We have a few that we’re in regular communication with [00:26:00] where if you’re in behavioral health, they want you to be using TherapyNotes. We have one where, he actually pays for your TherapyNotes subscription to get you started as a promotion. We work very closely with a number of billing providers.
What’s nice about that relationship also is they give us feedback as they hit walls where, hey, we can’t handle the circumstance because of a limitation of TherapyNotes, we work with them to see how can we better accommodate them. So they’ve been very helpful as well.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah, that’s great. I recently switched billing services and that was one of the big factors. I found one that was well-versed in TherapyNotes versus another billing company; they said, well, we could build you the software, it would be able to talk to TherapyNotes, but it’s two systems and we’d have to integrate them. I was like, that sounds hard. Let’s use TherapyNotes.
Brad: Billing providers absolutely have their place, but there are a lot [00:27:00] of our customers who have stopped using billing providers because we’ve made it so easy. They didn’t see strong need. Most psychologists, people in behavioral health, their billing is pretty straightforward. They have a service code, a diagnosis code, and that’s it. It’s pretty straightforward.
I’m not going to say you shouldn’t have a billing provider because there are absolutely reasons to have billing providers in many cases, but just to speak to how easy it is to do your billing in TherapyNotes, once you’ve done your note, you’ve entered your code at that point, your service code you entered when you created the appointment, your diagnosis code you created when you do your note, both of which automatically copy forward from prior appointments and prior information about the patient. So once you’ve done your note, you’re ready to click the button to submit the claim and you’re done.
Posting the ERA, which is when you receive the payment, we have a screen that automatically does that for you. It shows you, here’s what we think you should do, and then you click a button if the software got it right or you tweak it if you need to. In most cases, you don’t need [00:28:00] to.
The billing providers, what you can do in their scenario, you can give a user ID and a password to your billing provider, give them billing access only, and then they can click those buttons for you and make sure everything works well. We don’t charge for user accounts that are administrative.
If you’re giving a user ID to a biller, you don’t have to pay for that. They can do everything they need to do. It’s nice, they can’t read your notes, for example. They can see the diagnosis code and the service code, which comes from your note, but they can’t open the note to read the content of that information. They can’t read the reports in your case. They can’t download those files because every time you upload a file, you specify is it clinical or administrative, they won’t be able to see anything that’s clinical.
Same thing if you have a scheduler working for your practice, you can have them only see what they need to do their job. It’s easy, you just say they’re a scheduler. You don’t have [00:29:00] to start figuring out, should they have access to this screen or that screen, which is what an enterprise EMR would do. In TherapyNotes, you just say they’re a scheduler and we’re going to automatically give them only the access they need to do their job.
Dr. Sharp: Gosh, I feel like you said a lot of really important stuff in that segment. To emphasize a lot of that, one, billing is really easy in TherapyNotes just out of the gate. Brad said this but I want to reiterate for anybody listening that it literally is once you’ve entered the client information and written your note and put in their insurance information, from that point, it is a one click to submit an insurance claim, and then one more click to post that payment when the insurance claim comes back as processed. It’s super easy.
I tell people that all the time when they’re like, you take insurance in your practice but isn’t that so hard? It takes so much time. How much time do you spend on billing every week? I [00:30:00] get to say, well, maybe 15 seconds. How long does it take to click 200 times?
Brad: If you wait until the end of the day, you can click it once and it’ll submit them all at the same time. You don’t have to do it after each test. It takes basically no time.
And just so everyone’s aware of, you can also print a CMS form if you want to. Hopefully, you do it. I prefer you do it electronically, but you can print super bills. You can print CMS forms. We do also accept credit cards, so it’s a full, everything you need to do billing but electronic billing.
Oh, and then another point, electronic billing, you don’t have to be in network with the insurance providers. You can be out of network and still submit claims on behalf of the patient. A lot of people say, I don’t want to deal with insurance companies, but if you do it this way, you, first of all, you get paid in full from the patient and then you click the button for them.
They don’t have the anxiety of having to fill out paperwork and hope to get paid from the insurance company. They’re going to get paid [00:31:00] faster and you’re just doing a nice service for them. It’s actually easier for you than printing anything out and handing paperwork to the patient. You just click the button and it’s done. So something to keep in mind.
Dr. Sharp: I’m glad you brought that up. My wife is also a therapist. She is a cash-pay practice. I’m very biased to provide that service of submitting out-of-network claims for folks just as one less hurdle for them to have to deal with.
If you can say like, you pay us but we’ll submit the claim and they’ll reimburse you according to your plan. That puts people’s minds at ease rather than the whole super bill process. It’s another step for them to have to take care of.
Maybe we could talk nuts and bolts a little bit. A lot of people sometimes say, oh, I can’t afford an EHR or it’s too hard to get started [00:32:00] or what if I’m migrating from another system? Can you talk about some of those basic details of TherapyNotes and how you might handle some of that?
Brad: Sure. First off, if you’re converting from another product, we do conversions for free. So if you get us a spreadsheet of all your patients and so forth, we can take care of that.
There’s also no setup fees with TherapyNotes. We always offer one free month. So you could convert to us for free, pay no setup fee, and have a free month. After that, it’s month to month. We don’t do annual contracts. We don’t want to make you use TherapyNotes, we want you to love TherapyNotes. We’re going to earn that trust every month. We want to keep you using TherapyNotes.
The pricing, and obviously this is a podcast, if you are listening to this podcast in the future, the pricing might change, but currently, it’s $59 a month for one clinician and $30 for each additional clinician per month.
If you have a small practice, one person with less [00:33:00] than 12 or so patients, call us, we will be advertising a different rate structure in the very near future. We’ve never raised prices and we will not be raising prices as far as what I’m saying to you today that we will be updating pricing. What we’re going to do is be a little more competitive with the smaller practices.
We also have other pricing models. If you’re a nonprofit, we have a discount. If you’re education, we have discount. I won’t get into too much detail with those. And then there’s claims pricing and appointment reminder pricing, both subject to change in the near future so I don’t want to get into too much detail, claims are $0.14 each, appointment reminders are going to change soon, so I’m not going to even have outdated information on your podcast.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. Fair enough. I can emphasize too that, people, if you hear that $59 a month and think, oh goodness, I don’t have that, I just started my practice. Even [00:34:00] with one appointment reminder that works and keeps someone to coming to their session, that’s less than probably half of what you recoup. So it totally pays for itself within one client.
I think it’s important to emphasize for people who are hesitant to spend money on an EHR. I don’t need that, or it’s not worth it. It’s totally worth it.
Brad: It’s funny how we get calls, we’re talking to lots and lots of people every day calling interested in TherapyNotes and we have people who say, how can I afford $59 a month? But then we also have people that say, I don’t understand what’s the catch, why is it so affordable?
And those people usually, they’ve been out in the field and they’ve worked with enterprise EMRs, they’ve worked with other products and they don’t understand how is it so inexpensive, because if you were to look at an enterprise EMR, hospitals spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for their EMRs, just for their setup. A one-time setup fee could be $100,000 to set up a hospital EMR.
[00:35:00] Also we are the monthly model, that includes the fact that we’re backing up and storing all of your data, all of that’s in there. We provide unlimited phone support. So if you call us a lot, we’re not making any money on you.We are trying to be as competitive or as reasonable as possible with our pricing. It’s more about the fact that we have thousands and thousands of users, it adds up and we’re very happy with what we’re doing, but we always want to keep it affordable.
If you’re a nonprofit or if you’re a small practice that for whatever reason, $59 doesn’t work for you, call us and we’ll hopefully be able to work something out with you as well, especially nonprofits. We never would want a nonprofit to not use us because of a budget. We want to do what’s best for the community. We do all kinds of things for nonprofits.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great to hear. You’ve alluded [00:36:00] to many upcoming changes here in the next little while, so it might be a nice segue, where do you see TherapyNotes going in the future in terms of features? I’ll just leave it at that, features.
Brad: We just launched our document library which allows practices to have files available to all the people in their practice. For example, you may have a form that you frequently have your patients fill out or a homework that you give to them, you can put it in there and then anyone can download, print them and then hand them off to their patients.
That’s the first step towards a much larger project is we want you to be able to send those files to your patients through our patient portal and the patient portals be able to sign them or complete them. That is what we’re actively working on right now and making a lot of progress on. So the ability for basically in a nutshell, online paperwork, so patients can do intake paperwork [00:37:00] and so forth.
We’re always working on usability improvements, minor design improvements, and anything security-related. We’re right now overhauling how we reset passwords, for example, when someone loses their password and they call us. We’ve been spending weeks on this. You’d think it would be a simple project but because TherapyNotes is so important to keep things secure that it has to be right.
For the future, there are a few specifically for testing psychologists that I’m very excited about that are more in the research phase where we can facilitate that testing process and the report writing process. I’m very excited about those features and one of the reasons I was excited to be on your podcast.
I am very much hoping that when those features are ready, I’m going to come back on your podcast and we can talk about those some more. They’re [00:38:00] in the research stages. I can’t give too much more information than that, but I’m very excited about some of these future features.
In a nutshell, though, the biggest priority right now for us is our patient portal. It’s been lacking for a little while because we’ve been focusing a lot on billing-related features, which is the least glamorous part of therapy. I want to be helping patients and our clinicians.
I want where we can help the clinicians provide great service to their patients that help them improve and whatever there it is that they need to be helped with. Billing is the least glamorous side of that. I want to help them where we’re making difference with the patient. For example, appointment reminders, patients love that. That’s a direct feature where patients get that text message and they’re like, oh, great.
The appointment reminders, we had an issue once where they weren’t working. We know what that happens because the patients get very upset. We love having that direct [00:39:00] improvement on outcome for the patients as best we can.
We’re obviously not doing the therapy and we’re not doing the evaluations, but we want to help you do those things. So the patient portal is really important for us over the next several months. That’s where we’re going to be doing a lot of work.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. That’s good to hear. I think of all the things that people ask about or maybe raise as a hesitation with TherapyNotes, it’s patient portal, when can we send clients our forms? How can we make that happen?
Brad: We are close to a feature where you’ll be able to send forms to your patients. We’re going to have electronic signatures and then where they can do their intake paperwork and so forth. That is all in active development. I played with some of the features already. So that’s how far along it is.
Dr. Sharp: That’s good to hear. That’s fantastic.
Brad: When we were talking before the growth of the company, the reason we moved into our new space is we [00:40:00] were out of space in the old place. We need to hire more people. We’re now, like I said, 50 people, about 16 of which are developers. That’s the biggest development team we’ve ever had.
We’re looking to increase that. We have two active open recs for developers right now. That’s only the next step. We want to keep hiring. We have two separate teams now for developers and we’re going to be breaking that into a third team soon. So the speed at which we’re going to be adding new features will continue to accelerate.
Also, as we’re growing, we’re constantly having to handle the demand of the fact that there are thousands and thousands of people using our software. Obviously, we’re constantly working on architectural improvements as well.
Unfortunately, they’re not glamorous when we release the news, here’s the new version of TherapyNotes, it’s not the most glamorous that, hey, and now it’s going to be a little bit faster so that we can handle the fact that we’ve another thousand customers. That is something else we’re constantly working on so [00:41:00] that we can handle performance when you’re using TherapyNotes, when you click from page to page, you’re not sitting there with the wheel spinning. It’s always very fast.
We’re very mindful of that because that’s an important part of the usability of the software. We want to make sure you can access the site that is quick and it does what it’s supposed to do.
Dr. Sharp: I totally agree. It’s funny, I read those updates and it’s definitely not, like you said, glamorous by any means but behind the scenes.
Brad: We just released an update where there was almost nothing to say. Meanwhile, we have 16 developers working full-time for the four weeks that that release accounted for mostly because those are features for the future portal work that we’re doing that are completed but not released yet because it’s part of a bigger project. They can’t release any of it until it’s all done.
So if you see a small [00:42:00] what’s new in the news message, it’s because all of that effort went into features that haven’t been released yet and that there’s something big is coming.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. It’s a good reminder. I’ll go back to something you said a while back that I think it’s important to highlight that I can’t remember a time where y’all have rolled out a feature that didn’t work or was super buggy. I think that attention to like, hey, we’re spending more time on this to make sure that it’s right before we let it go to the public is pretty important.
Brad: We definitely prioritize that. In a nutshell, the development process, once a ticket is planned, just to get to that point is a bit of an ordeal, but let’s say you have a ticket ready for the developers to work on, it’s been identified as something that’s ready to go. The developer does it. A peer reviews it. Quality assurance person will test it. Lead Review will then look [00:43:00] at it again, which is a senior developer is going to make sure everything looks right. And then it goes through business review, which often is me.
So it goes through a lot of checks and balances. Then it goes live to my wife’s site, like I mentioned, she uses the version that no one else is using yet just to make sure it doesn’t have a problem. After the release, we account for the fact that for two days, we might get some bug reports. When there’s a release and we go two days and we don’t get any bug reports, we are very happy.
Usually, there’s one or two and they’re minor. You can’t submit a claim in this strange circumstance or something unusual happens. They’re very minor, they’re silently updated, we fix it immediately. We don’t wait four weeks for the next release to fix these minor things.
We tell you about the releases every four weeks, but there’s updates every so often if we see something that’s urgent that we want to update right away. Quality assurance is important here. In fact, [00:44:00] we just hired six people. They started about two weeks ago. Two of them are quality assurance, which means that we have now four people that are dedicated to quality assurance.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great. I think that’s super important. We’ve talked about a lot of different things. I appreciate the time, like I said. Let me put you on the spot a little bit before we totally take off and ask, is there anything else, for certainly mental health practitioners, but testing folks specifically that you think is important to know about an EHR as they consider that step?
Brad: I think we did a great job as far as covering a lot of important points. As far as a testing psychologist, I don’t know a specific testing psychologist, but I will say we were talking about security. Your computer, you want it to be secure, so that means your computer should have antivirus, it should be behind a firewall. We [00:45:00] strongly recommend you use a computer with encryption enabled.
If you have an iPad, and I think MacBooks they’re encrypted by default. PCs or Windows, I think Windows 10 might be, but you want to make sure that your computer is encrypted. Even though you’re not regularly putting data on your hard drive, if your laptop is stolen and you had a report you were working on, then that’s a problem. If your computer is encrypted, it’s not officially considered a breach. I would strongly recommend that.
My final note is that more of a warning for everyone, I’m trying to think of what else we could have covered. As far as TherapyNotes is concerned, like I said, it’s a free month. You try it out, there’s no contract, so you could use it for free and if you’re not happy, you can print those records and put them in your folders with the rest of your paper notes. Of course, like I said, unlimited free support. So if you have any questions at all, we can help you out.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great. Well, thanks [00:46:00] again, Brad. This is a really good conversation. It’s been an honor to talk with you after having TherapyNotes be such a big part of my practice for so many years. So thank you.
Brad: Well, thank you. I appreciate being on the podcast. In preparation for this, I was listening to some of your prior podcasts and I saw, oh, here’s one about EHRs. I started listening to it. I put it on speaker so my wife could hear because we were in bed reading and I’m like, oh, you have to listen to this. You were talking about TherapyNotes. So I was like, I guess we picked a good podcast to be on. So I really appreciate your support as well.
Dr. Sharp: Of course. I look forward to seeing what happens next with TherapyNotes. It sounds like y’all have some exciting things on the horizon. So thank you.
Brad: All right. Well, thank you very much.
Dr. Sharp: Take care. Bye bye. All right, y’all. I hope that you enjoyed that talk with Brad Pliner, CEO and co-founder of TherapyNotes. As you could tell through that interview, I [00:47:00] am a big fan of TherapyNotes. I’ve used it for a long time and it has never failed me to be the EHR that works really well for a testing practice.
As a gift to Testing Psychologist’s listeners, TherapyNotes has given us a promo code for an additional free month on top of the initial free month. You’ll get two free months of TherapyNotes with the promo code “test psych”. I’ll also have a link in the show notes to sign up directly with that promo code if you are a new user of TherapyNotes and want to try it out.
Again, like I said, this month’s podcasts are brought to you by Practice Solutions. Practice Solutions is a full-service billing company that specializes in claim submission, collecting payments, sending statements, and insurance verification for psychologists and mental health professionals. [00:48:00] I use them myself. They’ve been fantastic. Jeremy and Kathryn are a husband and wife team, and they just do a great job for us. They know the ins and outs of testing and can help you navigate the billing process if you are looking for some help with that.
As always, if you are enjoying these episodes, take 30 seconds, go to iTunes, subscribe, rate, review the podcast, help spread the word about testing resources, and get more people listening to the podcast. You can also join us on our Facebook group, The Testing Psychologist community where we’re having some great discussions about all things testing; business logistics, batteries, measures, and different things like that. We’d love to have you join us there.
If you have any interest in growing your testing practice or want to talk with somebody about how to navigate the testing business side and set up a testing practice or add services, you can give me a [00:49:00] call. We can talk for 20 or 30 minutes and chat about whether consulting would be helpful. If not, I can still point you in the right direction. So don’t hesitate to reach out. You can email me at jeremy@thetestingpsychologist.com if that sounds interesting to you.
Great to keep talking with y’all. I’ve enjoyed these past few podcasts and we have some great interviews coming up as well. In the meantime, take care, will talk to you soon. Bye bye.