Many of y’all know that I have been using TherapyNotes as our practice EHR for over 10 years now. I’ve looked at others and I keep coming back to TherapyNotes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get two free months of TherapyNotes by going to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code ‘testing’.
Thanks to PAR for supporting our podcast. The BRIEF2A is now available to assess executive functioning in adult clients. It features updated norms, new forms, and new reports. We’ve been using it in our practice and we really like it. Learn more at parinc.com/products/brief2a.
Hey [00:01:00] folks. Welcome back to the podcast. Glad to have you. Today is an EHR review episode. I haven’t done one of those in a while. There are some new EHRs breaking onto the scene and I wanted to review one of those today- Owl Practice. I’ve been hearing really good things about Owl Practice in comments and Facebook groups in the mental health world, so I thought I would check it out.
As usual with these EHR reviews, I think it’s most helpful to go watch the YouTube video. So there’s a, I think about 30 minute YouTube video where I am walking through Owl Practice and showing you all the features and commenting as we go along. The video is definitely going to be more robust, but I think you can gather some impressions from the audio as well.
As we head into the last part of 2024, it is time to announce new cohorts for The Testing Psychologist mastermind [00:02:00] groups. We’ll be starting in January with new cohorts for beginner, intermediate, and advanced practice groups. If you’re interested in joining one of those coaching groups, you can reach out at thetestingpsychologist.com and we can talk about whether it’s a good fit and decide which group might be right for you or if none of them are, and then we’ll talk about other options.
All right, without further ado, let’s talk about my experience with Owl Practice.
Hey folks, I am here to do another EHR review for you. If you haven’t checked out the other videos in the series, I’ve done an entire playlist on EHR reviews. I think we’re up to maybe, I don’t know, 7 or 8 EHR systems at this point. The way that I approach these EHR reviews [00:03:00] is digging in as a new user. So this is not meant to show the in-depth functionality of the EHR beyond a first pass when you first sign up. I’m looking for what is easy to do out of the box, user-friendliness, user interface, features that are specific to testing psychologists, that kind of thing.
Our EHR today is Owl Practice. If you haven’t heard of Owl Practice, I think it’s a lesser-known EHR, but the comments that I’ve seen about it are almost universally positive. I wanted to dig in and see what Owl Practice was all about.
As you can see, we are here on the home screen. This is the first thing that you see once you have done the initial setup of Owl Practice. I want to say, I enjoyed the initial setup. It’s a four-step process when you first log into the system and it forces you [00:04:00] to put in the crucial information to even be up and running to get started with the EHR. I really like that. It took 10 minutes. It asked for things like your practice info, your license number, and your clinician information. It has you set your availability and that also has you set your services and CPT codes right from the beginning.
Now, a comment right off the bat that I did not love was that the language, as you will probably see in this demo, is very therapy-centric. This is a problem that comes up with a number of EHRs but something that I noticed as a psychologist who’s only doing testing, I think it’d be really easy to change the language where it says practitioner or clinician. I don’t know why EHR would choose therapist as the default and alienate a whole group of practitioners, but so it goes, I’m splitting hairs you might say, [00:05:00] but I noticed that kind of thing.
Otherwise, the onboarding process was great. The CPT codes that they had by default were, of course, therapy codes, but it was very easy to change those two testing codes right there in the window. I think I should be up and running as far as services and CPT codes.
This is the first screen that you see when you log into Owl Practice. You’ll see right here, even with this little announcement, I think this is an indication of how much our Owl Practice pays attention to onboarding. They are very keyed into prompting you for specific features and letting you know about the different functionality in the system.
This is just one example that… I can’t show you the email sequence, but when I signed up for Owl Practice, it initiated a five-day email sequence all around onboarding. Each day they give you a little bit more information about crucial features and prompt you to set up those [00:06:00] features and give you resources from their help section on how to learn about those features. I found it pretty cool. It’s a different way to do onboarding that I’ve seen with some EHRs and it was helpful.
All right. Here we are in Owl practice. Oh, we have this as well. You get a $25 credit if you refer someone.
Pricing. People are going to be wondering about pricing. Let’s talk about that. It is very affordable. I’ll be honest. The starter version starts at $25 a month. The core version is $39. And then I think most folks are going to go for the pro version because it has most of the features or all the features that I think most of us will need. And that is $49 a month. So very affordable in the EHR landscape. If you’re not billing insurance, you might be able to get away with the core version of [00:07:00] $39 a month, but you need to upgrade to that pro version to get integrated insurance billing and claims.
Here we are. Again, just first impressions. I like this. This looks relatively clean. I like the UI. I pay a lot of attention to fonts, colors, branding, and that kind of thing. I do like the UI. It is, like I said, pretty minimalist, and pretty straightforward. I like this little pop of color over here to upgrade the plan. That’s a little sales technique, of course, to get you to consider that. So I’m going to walk through some of the core behaviors or functions that we need and see how that goes.
Right off the bat, let’s see. I like the calendar here. It’s pretty easy. I have to dig into the settings again, splitting hairs, but I don’t like starting a week on Sunday, I want Monday to be the first day of my [00:08:00] week, but it looks like it’s got the typical features. You can get back to today if you want, you can refresh. Sync- I’m curious what that does. Export- I’m also curious about that. The navigation is pretty easy, a little bit of a lag there, but not a big deal. And you can see the open spaces here. This is the availability that I set in the onboarding process. It goes from 9 to 5 each day. I do wish maybe there was a way to show the entire day all at once. I prefer that versus having to scroll, but we will see.
Let’s try to schedule an appointment. Let’s say that I needed to schedule this yesterday. Event type, client, personal, unavailable. I like this feature. You can set specific types of service. We [00:09:00] don’t have any clients here. That is a comment right off the bat. I wonder what it’s going to do here.
We’ll just say we want to do a test client. I want to see if I can walk through it. Oh, there’s no therapist either. Interesting. I did put my information in. So this is curious. That’s not letting me populate. I don’t love that. I would love buttons right here to just go ahead and add a new client and, or a new therapist in order to create that appointment. So let’s cancel this. It looks like we might need to go in and create some new clients.
Ooh, I definitely want to look at this. They have a waitlist feature that could be very valuable for a lot of folks. I’m assuming this is the [00:10:00] add a new client. I’d like that to be a little more obvious. All right, we will say we want to use this preferred name, January 29th, we’ll make this individual middle age. Good stuff here. Gender identity. It looks like it’s not a dropdown. It is just a freehand typing situation. So you can type in whatever you would like. The same with pronouns. Curious how this is going to populate through the system if you type it freehand. This is great. We’ve got the phone number. You can enable reminders right here. I do like that. And this is interesting. It has the therapist right here, but it [00:11:00] did not give me any options for a therapist on the other screen.
Client sense. That’s an interesting data point. You can put the referring provider’s name. That’s cool. Some comments here.
Appointment confirmations. I like this. You can set all the reminders.
Invoice create automatically or create manually. Okay, great. I like some of those automated features.
Let’s get back up here. This is just an address. Text Expander there. This is cool. We should be able to run with this client now. I’m checking through.
Language. I’m presuming you can add other languages in the settings, which is a nice feature, and we’ll allow [00:12:00] appointment.
Here is the waitlist. This is great. Your services auto-populate into the waitlist. This is cool. You can put people on the waitlist for an assessment intake. I might have to test that out in a little bit more detail here as we go along.
Add client seems straightforward. I’m going to do add and view just because. It’s going to make me… I’m going to disable the appointment confirmation emails and then we will do add and view. Test the client is here. It gives a little overview. Clinical details, diagnosis, circle of care. That’s interesting. Add contact. Add a link to the account. All right. Got you.
This is the [00:13:00] financial component. Payment methods. What can we do? I guess we can edit maybe. And medications. Interesting to have a separate medications tab. Okay. So add. That’s add appointment. I’m guessing this is just add… No, that’s add to do. Where am I? Oh, the add button is down here. I don’t know. This is not super intuitive to me, but we will keep rolling.
With the edit button, the edit button is down here, I am going to go ahead and add a diagnosis. Let’s go ADHD combined. This should be good. All that looks pretty straightforward. We [00:14:00] have saved the client. We have a diagnosis input. I’m going to go back to the calendar and let’s see if we can now create an appointment for yesterday.
Client. Here we go. It’s going to auto-populate the clinician. So you presumably set the clinician in the client screen. All right. Great. Service. We’re going to go ahead and say assessment intake. It does not recur. Here we go. We have created an assessment intake. I like this. It’s nice and bright. It tells you what the service is. Now, true question. Can we move it around? Oh yes, we can. Ooh, the session is invoiced. Please try again with an uninvoice session. I like this. So now we’re going to click in. It has been charged. [00:15:00] This is good. It’s just telling us that it’s charged. I wonder what happens when we click this. Nothing. It just includes the fly-out right here but it is attended. We can record payment right from here. Let’s go ahead and view that invoice and see what happens.
Let’s take a break to hear from a featured partner.
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Our friends at PAR have released the latest addition to the BRIEF2 family. The BRIEF2A lets you assess your adult clients with the gold standard and executive function. It was developed with the three-factor model from the BRIEF2, which characterizes executive functioning deficits more clearly. It also offers updated norms, new forms, and new reports. Learn more at [00:17:00] parinc.com/products/brief2a.
All right, let’s get back to the podcast.
Okay. I like this. I was concerned it was going to take us away from that screen but it creates a pretty simple invoice. Appointment is not yet scheduled. Balance due $250. Great. So you can email the client. I’m guessing it will auto-populate if we put in an email address. You can password-protect it. That’s an interesting feature. That’s kind of cool. All right, great. And let’s see what else we got. We can close out of this and be right back here, which I like.
Payment actions. Let’s go ahead and record a payment and see what that looks like. We’re going to say credit card, amount paid $250. Now, is it charging the [00:18:00] card? It can’t because we haven’t put one in, but we’re going to record this payment. Okay. Awesome. So now it shows you that you have paid. Invoice auto creates an invoice and takes you to the screen if you want to send a receipt. It’s kind of cool. All right. Nice.
Let’s see how it handles units. Let’s say we did some testing with this individual. Here we go. We’re adding our client. We’ve populated. Therapist service- we’re going to say we did some testing. Now, how do we create an add-on? I’m going to create this session. [00:19:00] How do we create an add-on folks?
All right. So clearly something, if you mark the session as attended, that locks it to some degree, but you can still create the note. So I’m going to go back to our intake and try to create a note here. So intake assessment note, I’m just going to work off this template. See what this is. This is clearly therapy intake notes. I don’t know if I love this format, all these dropdowns of very specific symptoms.
Oh gosh. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We’re not going to be doing that. I don’t know if I love these notes. This just feels like a lot of typing and a lot of manual work to do. Hopefully, there’s [00:20:00] a way to change that. I do like all these features off to the side. So let’s close that.
All right. Now, as far as this appointment goes though, how do we do an add-on code? I’m not seeing an option for an add-on code. And that’s going to be a problem for us and some other services. Just a note. And then, finally, we’ll go in and we’ll create a feedback appointment just to round out the whole process here. I’ll go ahead and create that.
Let’s go ahead and click through some more options. Let’s see what workflow [00:21:00] does. We’ll circle back.
So workflow, it looks like there’s, okay, this is kind of cool. Maybe this is a to-do list. Tasks. It’s not exactly a to-do, but what happens when you click on these notes? Yes, it does give you the notes that you have to write. So this is kind of cool. I like this. It’s sort of like a unified to-do list. And then you have specific options here that you can use.
Let’s see what the dashboard function is. This is mostly financial it looks like. We got revenue per session. That’s cool. Discount sessions. So you can see it’s populating here in October we’ve got one session. [00:22:00] Year over year. Practice stats. I love a good graph. Projected total sessions. Discount. This has given you a decent little dashboard to track, and looks like, yes, you can export these if you want to manipulate them. You can go by the therapist. Therapist grades. Ooh. Okay. So this is cool. I like this. I love a good dashboard. Clinical stats, client demographics, forms, measures, medications, and client tags. Oh, waitlist count. This is cool. This is a relatively robust dashboard in Owl Practice. I like that you can export all this. Okay, nice.
[00:23:00] Let’s see what manage is. This is the only thing… These three options and settings are a little confusing to me. They seem to overlap. It’s not immediately apparent what each one does, but I’m sure you can learn that.All right. So you’ve got your forms in here, which is cool. They’ve populated. Let’s see what happens if we edit the intake form. So it’s got a basic form editor. I wish this was bigger so I could see what the actual question is, but yeah, a basic form editor. You can add a different thing. Wait. I thought that was a dragging situation. It is not a dragging [00:24:00] situation.
How do I put these things into the form? I’m not sure if this is a function of maybe the trial that I’m doing or what, but I would love to add. I’m trying to double-click. Okay. That’s interesting. I can’t figure out totally how to make those fields go in there. Suffice it to say though, you could do that somehow. So you can edit all your forms. That’s cool.
Measures. Let’s check out the measures. They have a bunch of built-in outcome measures and other kinds of things. Is there a search? I mean, this is a lot of measures. That doesn’t work. I’m not sure this is a global search box for the EHR. [00:25:00] So I’m going to just scroll through. Lots of publicly available measures.
Handwritten notes. That’s interesting. I’m not sure what that might be. Note templates. So you could, yes, I’m assuming you can create your own. I’m not going to go through this process, but I will just jump in and see what this looks like. Again, how do you do this? Oh, it just jumps in there. Oh, that’s interesting. You can see you just click on it and it shows up.
Dynamic content from client profile. I like this. So these are dynamic fields that are going to pull automatically from the client. I could see this being a pretty cool option to build your forms, but of course, you would have to do that.
[00:26:00] Practice documents. I’m not sure what this is exactly. I’m guessing it’s handouts, worksheets, and things like that that you might share with clients.Let’s look at this. Tons of settings. Practice logo. You can adjust the size. It’s neat. This is all the multi-factor off. Calendar colors. I love being able to manipulate colors. Financial documents. Customize your invoice. Room Booking. Cool. If you need that feature. Tags- you can add client tags and search for them. Insurance profiles. So this looks like it works for Superbills. And then, yes, you have to upgrade if you want the in-network billing features. Therapist settings. Okay, just a lot of settings [00:27:00] here to set permissions and so forth. And then, of course, admin settings.
Locations. We have one location here. We could add more. This is a user situation. I would think I would be an administrator but maybe I need to add that. I’m guessing you could add it here. Or maybe this is for your actual administrative staff. All right. There I am as a therapist.
Therapist grades. I”m not exactly sure what that might be.
Services and fees. You can see we already input a lot of those. You can add more here.
The Client portal. So definitely a client portal. You can configure all sorts of settings right here.
[00:28:00] Forms. We dipped into a little bit. It looks like these are the forms that are available on the client portal and the messages that go out to the client from the client portal. Form reminders, clinical measures messages, clinical measures reminders. I like that you can customize these things. I really do like that.The client portal homepage. They have online booking. You can select all kinds of options for allowing clients to book into the portal. That’s great. Payment details. Interesting.
Cheque. This must be a Canadian company is my assumption. I think that sounds familiar now that I’m thinking about it. The cheque with the que is [00:29:00] tipping me off and then the selection of French as the language.
Notifications. This is great. Okay.
Client reminders. It looks like you can customize these to some degree or can you? It looks like you can’t do it by appointment type, unfortunately, but you can customize the message for confirmations and reminders.
Secure messaging. Cool. So you can do secure messaging either in the office only between your staff or with clients as well. Clients can message any therapist or know their assigned therapist. Office admins can message clients. Cool. Users. You can set permissions there and then subscription I’m guessing this is yes.
I’m on the free trial. FYI, you can do a free trial for two weeks without putting in a credit card, which I think [00:30:00] people appreciate. And then billing is going to give you a summary of your billing. Help is going to go to their help section.
Sync, what are we doing? We can do a Google Calendar Sync with Google. It does do two-way sync with Google and it looks like other calendars as well. This is the privacy mode. So you can see… What can you see? What did that do? Oh, okay. It gives the initials here. It eliminates the name, which is nice.
It takes a little bit to load. Just slightly annoying.
Recently viewed. It’s my clients. Oh, there you go. You can add a client right there. Upgrade plan, Email help, tutorial, sign out. Great.
What are the settings here? We can hide if you don’t work on weekends. [00:31:00] You can set your calendar interval. I’d probably put that at 30 minutes start time. I wish we could do a week start time, but so it goes. Let’s see. Just a little UI issue here. Looks like you can’t apply these or maybe it’s because this is overlaid. Maybe it’s just the window size, but that’s a bummer.
All right. What is this button? I’m just clicking buttons y’all. I’m not sure how that’s different from the day view but there you have it. You can do week, month. Your appointment shows up like that. I like that.
I like Owl. Generally speaking, there’s a [00:32:00] lot to like here. The setup is pretty clean I think. I found the navigation to be relatively intuitive. I think with some time you can certainly get more familiar with these options over here and how to navigate through the software. I like that you got a clean calendar here and I think would look even cleaner if you could reduce the interval there so it’s half an hour instead of 15-minute blocks, that lengthens the calendar. You can move things around, and change the appointment time just by dragging. So that’s all good. All this stuff is pretty straightforward. I think this is a pretty familiar calendar layout now for most EHRs and that’s a good thing. Some privacy mode up there, which I like. Easy to add a client and easy to search. This is cool. You can [00:33:00] search a lot of different fields with this box. Otherwise, the settings are pretty easy to navigate. I like the onboarding. It’s a generally clean system.
Things that I don’t love at least at this point.
The language, like I said, the ability to do add-on codes; I didn’t see an easy way to do that. I’d have to poke around a little bit more and see how that might work. I’m guessing there’s a Help article on it.
What else? Just little, nitpicky things here and there. It takes a little bit to load when you click into different calendar screens and I’d love to have customizable reminders dependent on appointment type, little things like that.
All in all, if I could figure out the add-on issue and make sure that that works, [00:34:00] then I could consider Owl as an option for testing psychologists. You have customizable forms, you have inclusive language options in the client screen, and a lot of outcome measures as well. The dashboard looks cool. I’m just reflecting on some other things that I liked about it. I’d say the downsides, at least at this point, are relatively minor with that big asterisk of making sure that you can set up add-on codes and bill for them.
I hope that you enjoyed this review. I hope it was informative and helpful. Go check out the other EHRs if you are considering an option for your practice.
All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes. So make sure to check those out.
If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or [00:35:00] Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast.
And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologist Mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
[00:36:00] The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website are 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.Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here and similarly no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with expertise that fits your needs.