This episode is brought to you by PAR. PAR offers the RIAS-2 and RIST-2 Remote to remotely assess or screen clients for intelligence, and in-person e-stimulus books for these two tests for in-person administration.] Learn more at parinc.com.
All right, y’all, welcome back!
Today’s episode is another EHR review. The star EHR for today is an EHR called TherapyAppointment. Again, many of you may have heard of TherapyAppointment. It’s been around for a few years and with good reason. TherapyAppointment is pretty strong. I’m excited to jump into the review.
So, I will do a brief episode here where I talk through the pros and cons and a verdict for TherapyAppointment. But the real star of the show for these EHR reviews is the accompanying YouTube video. You can access the YouTube video in the blog post, or there’s a link in the show notes, or if you’re a subscriber to the YouTube channel, The Testing Psychologist, you can go and check out the videos there.
Before we get to the review, I want to invite any beginner practice owners out there who might want a little accountability and support in a group setting to consider the beginning of practice mastermind that’s going to be launching in a couple of months.
So the beginner practice mastermind is a group coaching experience. I’m the facilitator. You will be in a group with five other psychologists who are all in the beginning phases of practice.
It’s really aimed at folks who are about six months away from launching their practice all the way to six months on the other side of launching their practice. And we talk about things that are challenging in the beginning, things like how to find office space, how to set up a business, what materials to buy, how to do it effectively, setting up your schedule, how to get clients, marketing, those sorts of things. Finances, all of those pieces come up at the beginner practice groups.
So if you’d like some group accountability and help along the way, you [00:03:00] can go to the thetestingpsychologist.com/beginner and get more information and schedule a pre-group phone call to see if it’d be a good fit.
Let’s go ahead and get to my review of TherapyAppointment.
Okay, everybody. We are back here and ready to dive into this brief overview of my TherapyAppointment experience. Now, again, these episodes are just meant to be a really simple, quick pros and cons of each of these EHRs with the idea being that you really go and check out the YouTube videos that go along with each review.
So those are [00:04:00] linked in the show notes and on the webpage. You can jump in there and check it out. Those are about 40 minutes long.
Now let’s get right to it. Overall, I liked TherapyAppointment. Here are some of the things that stood out with TherapyAppointment. The first is pricing. They do offer tier pricing, kind of like fair and nest. But the tiered pricing starts at $10 a month if you have fewer than10 appointments. That could work for a testing psychologist. And then it bumps up from there. I think their unlimited appointments are $59 a month, which is competitive with the other EHRs.
One thing that I liked about TherapyAppointment was the onboarding process. When you sign up with TherapyAppointment, they have you sign a business associate agreement right off the bat, and that is saved and recorded. You don’t have to dig through and sign it later. And that’s a crucial part of any software that [00:05:00] you work with. It’s right there, it’s signed and it’s in the system from the very beginning.
And then from there, they take you through a nice little initial walk-through where they force you to input all of the crucial information that you will need to schedule appointments, bill insurance, take credit card payments, that sort of thing.
So, it gets all that stuff out of the way right from the beginning. It doesn’t give you the option to do it later. In some cases, it does if you don’t have that information. It’s very proactive where it walks you through that process rather than just providing say a checklist for you to complete at your own leisure once you get into the system. That was pleasantly surprising for me. I tend to be someone who likes to just jump in and get right to it. But I actually, appreciated that they made me put in this important information from the beginning [00:06:00] so that I could hit the ground running. And it took maybe five minutes so it’s not like it was a huge deal.
Once you’ve got into the software, it was laid out really nicely. The aesthetics were great. I liked the colors. It’s kind of like a blue and orange color scheme. That may not resonate with some people, but I thought it looked nice. The layout was good. The font was relatively easy to read, not too tiny. So again, aesthetics were on point.
Now a little more specific to the clinical piece. There was a really easy set-up of CPT codes and add-on codes. It was quite simple to specify which were base, which were add-ons, how many units should be billed for each one, and whether it should be one per occurrence or if you could do multiple, and if so, what the time frame would be, or the [00:07:00] time limit for each add-on unit. That was great. They had pre-populated a couple of testing codes. It was interesting that they had actually pre-populated more add-on codes than anything.
But it was easy to add my own and pair those with add-on codes. Let me say the appointment scheduling process was pretty straightforward with TherapyAppointment. A little hiccup in the workflow but nothing major. It took me just a minute to poke around and figure out. I think the problem was trying to figure out how to assign a CPT code to an appointment. But ultimately, it’s just ended up that I had missed a button and it allowed me to do that.
So, setting up an appointment was pretty easy. Let’s see. One thing that really jumped out as a positive, if you bill insurance, TherapyAppointment has a [00:08:00] built-in feature called the claim scrubbing feature.
So, any of you familiar with insurance know that claims have to be quote, and quote clean to get paid. And TherapyAppointment is the first EHR I have worked with to explicitly at least I have a claim scrubbing feature. It goes through and before it let you submit a claim, it tells you if there’s any missing information and it walks you through a process to resolve or correct the things that are wrong or the things that are missing. So that was really cool. I think that’d be really helpful for folks who build insurance.
So many positives for TherapyAppointment.
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[00:09:40] The things that did not go so well. One thing that right of the bat that honestly almost caused me to scrap the review and not do it in the first place is they do require that you put in a credit card to get started. They don’t charge the credit card, but you do have to put one in. I did not like [00:10:00] that. So, this just means that there’s going to be an extra step if you’re doing a free trial that you’ll have to go back in and cancel to make sure that your card doesn’t get charged.
Another thing that stood out is they really didn’t have very many choices at all for gender identity. I think in this time with so many of us being attentive to different aspects of identity and so forth, this was to me just a complete oversight. And maybe I missed it somewhere, but it wasn’t clear. They really just give male, female and other, which I think corresponds to what insurance claims need. But it was disappointing to only see those options. Hopefully, those exist somewhere else in the system, but I could not find them.
Another thing that jumped out as a big problem with many EHRs that I’ve reviewed from the testing perspective is that there is no clear way to create [00:11:00] a note or a custom session note that would match to the requirements of testing psychologists. It was pretty limited in terms of the note templates that they had. And I again, couldn’t find an easy clear way to create a custom note template. Maybe it’s in there, but I couldn’t find it.
The last piece is, this is kind of a small complaint about the dashboard. I feel it could be a little clearer regarding notes that need to be done. But that’s again, just a small complaint. They are listed there in the form of appointments. So they list your appointments. It doesn’t explicitly say, write a note for this appointment, but it does list all of your appointments in your dashboard. And when an appointment is there, that means that you need to write the note and do the billing for it. So, it’s a good reminder, but I would like it to be just a little bit more explicit.
In [00:12:00] terms of the overall verdict for TherapyAppointment, when you watch the YouTube video, you’ll see that I really liked TherapyAppointment. Of all the EHRs that I’ve reviewed, this came the closest to TherapyNotes, which is by far my favorite and has been for years and years. But I liked TherapyAppointments. I felt like it flowed pretty well. There are still some hurdles to get over in terms of that note template not being friendly to testing and the gender identity stuff, those are tough.
But all in all, I think this is definitely a possibility for a testing psychologist especially if they could make some updates where you could change the note template, that would be awesome. That would go a long way. So, I would consider this still on the table. If you’re a testing psychologist, you should give it a [00:13:00] look particularly if you’re going to ramp up slowly. They have a pretty nice tiered pricing model that’s barrier friendly. The entry is very low.
All that said along with the walkthrough at the beginning to help you get started, I think this is a decent one. It’s certainly a possibility for anybody who might be looking for a new EHR or launching a practice.
As I said in the beginning, if you haven’t checked out the YouTube video for this episode, I would definitely go do that. It’s about 40 minutes long, a lot more detailed, and you can see for yourself what TherapyAppointment looks like.
And if you are a beginner practice owner who is looking to launch a practice in 2021, or just get some support maybe after you’ve already launched a practice recently, then I would invite you to consider the beginner practice mastermind group which is launching in a couple of months, likely in March.
Stay tuned. I will be back on Monday with a clinical episode and then the following Thursday, we are continuing with EHR reviews. I think that I’m kind of losing track. It’ll either be IntakeQ or it will be an EHR called Jane, which is a new one on the scene that a lot of people are saying good things about.
So, stay tuned. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, now’s a great time to do it. Start 2021 right and catch all of the testing related content that’s coming up. Y’all take [00:15:00] care and I’ll talk to you next time.
The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist 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.