Practice Mate

Puntos a favor

I use EHR 24/7 along with Practice Mate. The systems talk to each other and make coding and billing easy. We use a billing company, and they submit the claims and follow things through to the end for us. It's a very simple process.

With Practice Mate, you can bill participating and non-participating providers through their system, and it's all free! The only time you have to pay is if more than half of your submitted claims for the month are non-participating, but even then it only costs $35 for the month, regardless of how many claims are submitted. It's a great deal.

Puntos en contra

We are still pretty new to the system, but to this point we haven't had any problems. I'm excited to get things rolling.

Puntos a favor

I love that we can color code our schedules to differentiate b/w OT/ST

Puntos en contra

Needed fixes: Make daily schedule show only therapists working that day visible; Allow schedule to drag L/R for view of all treating therapists that entire day at once

Puntos a favor

I've used Office Ally for over 10 years, and in the early years it has worked very well for me, however, if I knew what I know about Office Ally now, I would not have started using it.

Puntos en contra

In the last several years, there have been more mistakes made by practice mate, claims that appear to have been submitted that were not. Fortunately, the Office Ally Tech support is usually very helpful when I call them, although in this case of some claims not going through, that issue has still not been resolved.
The biggest issue however, that I would urge users of Practice Mate to consider, is if you use this program to write notes, at some point in time, if you ever want to stop using Practice Mate, you will not have easy access to these notes. I was told that there is no easy way of downloading or printing these notes. You have to go into each session, and cut and paste each note onto another document. If you don't want to go through this trouble, and for me it would be thousands of notes I would have to cut and paste, it effectively locks you into using Practice Mate, and almost impossible to shift over to another billing software program. You can export patient demographic information to other programs, but notes cannot be exported. If I had known this when I started with Office Ally, I would not have started. Hopefully Office Ally will fix this problem which could easily dissuade users from wanting to sign on.

Puntos a favor

My familiarity with the product. Been using it for almost 20 years. It is very user friendly, easy to navigate and can be used by more than one person at at time. Auto posting feature is sufficient. Claims scrubber helps to create clean claims. No cost for support staff user accounts

Puntos en contra

Statement feature is decent except the way the statements are formatted is only semi professional, only in Black and White and no lines to separate visits.

Puntos a favor

Does all your billing and scheduling. Very rarely have issues with denied claims. Catches mistakes we make before being sent out. Low cost. Does phone, text, and email reminders.

Puntos en contra

Can't manually send out text reminders. Can't link reminder system to a phone number, uses a random phone number. A little bit of a learning curve and sometimes slow loading pages. System can't hold large files. Only will show 100 patients, have to deactivate patients to see the full list. The program needs work, but they have been updating it.

Puntos a favor

I've been using Practice Mate for many years, since I quit paying somebody to do my billing for me. It keeps track of everything

Puntos en contra

I don't have any complaints, I use this for billing insurance, patient information and billing patients.

Puntos a favor

Low cost and intuitive system with features including interfaces with labs and imaging. Easy to use scheduling and EMR.

Puntos en contra

Consistently slow, and often completely unresponsive for long periods of time throughout the day. At peak times, the system experiences even more of a slow down.

Puntos a favor

Price.They provide a clearinghouse.A one stop for everything needed.Training readily available.

Puntos en contra

Functionality/ Limitations. Customization's for superbil and more.. Accounting for payments.. Flowing from one section to another. Eligibility checks .Patient data profile.

Puntos a favor

It provides an efficient clearing house for billing. The technical staff does attempt to assist your needs.

Puntos en contra

This software is not suited for mental health documentation. It is designed for medical offices. It lacks flexibility.

Puntos a favor

The system has billing capabilities, that's all.

Puntos en contra

Not user friendly with scheduling when there is more than one provider
Will frequently get kicked out of the system and notes are not saved
Poor follow up with customer service
Terrible experience with Reminder Mate

Puntos a favor

I have used this service for nearly 8 years and have loved it for the calendar and insurance processing for insurance claims for my patients and clients.

Puntos en contra

They recently changed to charge for certain insurance companies an extra fee which has made the service more expensive than it was for the original 7 years. I am considering moving all this over to TherapyNotes to submit my insurance claims because I am a small practice.

Puntos a favor

How everything can be saved for billing and makes it go so much smoother, easy to add patients and easy to submit claims. Claims are processed very quickly!

Puntos en contra

Sometimes the billing shows a claim went successfully through, but then the insurance claim will say they never received a claim for a particular date of service. Has happened a lot.

Puntos a favor

I like that it's easy to customize your patient schedule with several views (daily, weekly, monthly) and you can add multiple columns per day to clarify patient visits among several providers.

Puntos en contra

I have had a several issues where the program freezes and crashes my computer, but I'm not sure if that's a hardware or software issue.

Puntos a favor

Offers useful functions for accounting, billing, etc. if you don't plan to use the patient portal.

Puntos en contra

Their patient portal, Patient Ally, is AWFUL and I don't recommend it. Be prepared to deal with lots of bugs and customer service that just gives you the run around.

The Upcoming Appointments feature of the portal does not work at all anymore. We've called several times to fix it over the last 6 months, and they just say "We are working on it" and refuse to give an estimated time to fix it. When we've expressed displeasure about this, we were ignored. We lose business because patients check their upcoming appointments tab and see they have nothing scheduled, even though they are in our schedules. Office Ally just doesn't care either so we will be looking for another solution.

There are also plenty other bugs. For example, patients can sometimes request appointment slots that are already full, leading to double-booking. This is not because someone was scheduled in the time between the appointment request and confirmation. It is purely a software bug. The time it takes to resolve these issues with support is lengthy, and often the errors are never fully resolved.

A fairly large chunk of our patients have trouble using it, and completing the on-boarding enrollment.

We also had a worrisome customer service experience with their partner for integrated credit card processing, so we had to use a separate processor.

Puntos a favor

It's real easy to do billing here. Everything is well organized and I love how it connects to EHR. It makes it easy to look up patients information and uploads without having to switch over to EHR.

Puntos en contra

Sometimes I still get lost here. A better layout for all the tabs and functions could be implemented, but the way it is right now isn't too bad.

Puntos a favor

I like the ease of filing insurance, keeping up with client information and the reminder service. It was been a huge help that didn't hurt our bottom line.

Puntos en contra

Getting charged for an excess of Claims for a particular insurance provider. The software isn't always smooth to operate. It seems a little dated.

Puntos a favor

Access To help and software is very intuitive. Overall it's a great program with many great features.

Puntos en contra

Billing portion is not so great. And prescribing medication is not an option. I had many problems with checking eligibility as well.

Puntos a favor

I love that it is almost free. We pay $35 for the clearing house and the PM. Its another $29.95 per doc for the EHR.

Puntos en contra

It is somewhat confusing. I feel like I go in circles. But I may not have used it enough. It does work though to get claims out and organize payments and rports'

Puntos a favor

very easy to use - if not support is right around the corner ! - Very detailed

Puntos en contra

I have had times logging in that were tough when working remotely - but could be a ME problem !

Puntos a favor

I like that this is a one stop shop for my small practice. It is great to be able to schedule, bill, take payments, make appointments and keep charts in one spot!

Puntos en contra

I don't like that there are a limit amount of notes. It was also a bit of a learning curve to get up and running.

Puntos a favor

It will do anything I need to do - and the tech support is awesome.

Puntos en contra

Its not pretty and slightly difficult to learn.

Puntos a favor

Easy to track claims. I love how there is a calendar that helps you understand when claims were submitted and when they were rejected.

Puntos en contra

A little hard to read rejected or processed claims. There needs to be some sort of portal.I'd like to see a list of all the claims.

Puntos a favor

I can send an email message to the doctors.

Puntos en contra

Where do I begin.... There's not enough space or time.

Puntos a favor

It's cheap. The word cheap here represents all facets -- price, functionality, non-existent customer service. You get what you pay for.

Puntos en contra

- You have to sign up for each 'program' individually.
- The programs don't communicate with each other.
- While signing up for each program individually, you have to fax sheets. You will do this multiple times, have someone tell you they never got it, then give up and get another EHR. Then, they magically find your fax after 2 weeks, sign you up and send you a bill.
- While you are trying to sign up for everything, you will work with an awesome person with the payment processing/credit swiper who will sign you up and give you a good deal. However, once you give up on OfficeAlly and go with another EHR, the credit card people are rude and try to charge you a penalty for canceling your contract.
- As for functionality -- it's bare bones, lots of searching for what you want/need.
- Did I mention the down time??
- Ugh - stay away!