With mental health issues on the rise due to the pandemic among other reasons, more things are going virtual, including therapy sessions and the way information is managed. The day-to-day life of being a therapist can get overwhelming with scheduling, back-to-back sessions, inputting data, dealing with insurance, payments, holding groups, going to training, and finding resources for clients. You really need to get involved with some sort of organization tool that will make your life easier.
According to an article with the American Psychological Association, there are at least 10,000 mental health-related apps in existence. They often come and go on and off the market depending on various factors, but there are quite a few that stick around. There are apps for clients themselves, such as Calm, Headspace, and Happify; then there are apps solely for therapists to use in their practice to make their life easier, which is what will be focused on in this article.
Applications that can be used in a therapeutic setting with a client can help with connectivity, build a relationship and rapport, drive goal-setting and data-tracking, encourage accountability, and to boost client support. There are also various apps created for therapists only that they can use in their practice that will help them with managing their time and patient load.
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Let’s take a look into the top ten apps to help you manage your therapy practice.
Ten Helpful Apps For Therapy Practice Management
What are some great apps used to help manage a therapy practice in today’s on-the-go world? There truly are many great choices out there for anyone looking for resources in this area. To help refine the search, however, here is a quick list of ten great apps to help you manage your therapy practice.
- Tracksmart
- Therapy Notes
- Medical Terminology Dictionary
- DemandForce
- Due Time Tracker
- Full Slate
- Evernote
- Simple Practice
- Hootsuite
Tracksmart
Tracksmart is a time and attendance-tracking app. No matter the practice size, Tracksmart can clock any employee’s attendance times, breaks, leaves, and more. In addition, the app hosts an excellent scheduling and attendance platform with which entire employee schedules can be created, distributed to employees wirelessly, and more. In the name of utmost versatility, the app can also be utilized from any number of devices to include employee cell phones and computers.
The following reviews come from SoftwareAdvice.com:
Pros: “For a long time, this process was all done on paper in our office. Tracksmart was a game changer for us, allowing us to streamline how we manage time sheets, time off requests, and seeing an up-to-date calendar of who’s out of the office.”
Cons: “I wish time off requests or any important dates were emailed as a reminder 24 hours prior to the event.”
Whether you’re having an issue with employee attendance and want to streamline the process of tracking it, or just want to modernize your way of doing things, Tracksmart may be the app for you.
Therapy Notes
Therapy Notes by MyClientsPlus is a comprehensive, all-encompassing app built specifically for therapy practices and their many typical functions. This app is completely cloud/web-based and is a toolkit that allows the user to handle therapy billing, client portals, therapy notes, various reports, general practice planning and management, and more. The therapy notes function of the app also provides a range of useful templates with which to handle this important area of the job. 24-hour tech support and a five-star Capterra rating round out the app nicely.
There are various plans to choose from and they offer a 30-day trial so that you can see if the app will truly benefit you and your practice.
With your plan you get…
- Free 30-day trial
- Pricing guarantee
- Free client data import from another EMR
- Incredible phone and email support
- Custom client portal
- Automatic software updates
- Secure, worry-free backups
- Unlimited clients, appointments, and notes
- Unlimited file storage
And optional paid add-ons include…
- Telehealth
- Electronic billing
- Appointment reminders
- Credit card processing
- Medical billing services
The following reviews come from SoftwareAdvice.com:
Pros: “TherapyNotes EHR is an outstanding software for my private counseling practice. It’s ease of use and ample “help” section makes it simple for me to learn anything I have questions about–most of the time without even needing to call them. I’ve been a customer since 2016 and have only positive feedback to give. Use the free-trial offer. I did and have no regrets.”
Cons: “I wish there was part of the software that would save past med trials. I enter them in my initial eval, but they do not save and as I try to discontinue medications, I would like them to be saved.”
Medical Terminology Dictionary
Whether it be psychiatric nursing, physical therapy services, or even surgical care, the proper terminology is critical to concise care and understanding within it.
In this very spirit, the Medical Terminology Dictionary is a great app designed for quick-reference of virtually any and all medical terms. The app itself works independently of an internet connection once installed and is free to use. With it, any therapy practice can stay up to date on proper terminology in all communique and records.
The following reviews come from Google Play:
Pros: “This app is better than carrying around a Medical Doctor or Nurse and better than the Red Cross First Aid Book.”
“Easy to use and understand medical teams and treatments. Not just for medical students, but for everyone who wants to better understand what doctors & specialists are talking about.”
Cons: “I’m an auditory learner, so I would love to have an app where a voice pronounced the word and read the definition.”
Overall, this app provides all of the medical terminology out there and continuously updates when new terms come along. Users can search for words in various ways to make it more efficient to get results. It seems as if the main complaints are that there aren’t images with every term and that there is not yet a text-to-speech option.
Perhaps in future updates there will be more features!
DemandForce
DemandForce is a comprehensive communications management app designed for use with any out-patient medical service. Essentially, this app handles all client communications, much with automation, in order to streamline and make much more efficient the administrative side of running a practice. DemandForce handles appointment reminders and confirmations, online forms and acknowledgements, and even various forms of outbound marketing communique, making practice management much simpler in the end.
With the app, you can efficiently do the following…
- Attract patients
- Manage appointments
- Communicate with patients
- Control online reputation
- Increase productivity
- Measure success
The following reviews come from SoftwareAdvice.com:
Pros: “DemandForce was a great tool to keep our patients informed about their appointments. The platform was easy to use and offered customization options to fit the needs of our large practice. The customer service team was also always quick to respond and troubleshoot problems as they were presented.”
Cons: “The reporting options were pretty basic and that’s an area that we spend a lot of our time in to learn about what works and what doesn’t work for our patients.”
Due Time Tracker
Due Time Tracker is a versatile timer and time tracking app that also integrates invoice generation based on times and other set parameters. Essentially, a therapist or other staff member can then track times spent with clients or on other business matters and then have the app automatically handle billing and other reporting areas based on those very recorded times. This app is quite versatile in its efficacy for a single individual as well as for entire companies if needed.
There are many aspects to running an effective therapy practice. No matter the type of therapeutic services provided, times, record-keeping, billing, and many other factors must all be responsibly handled on a daily basis. When it comes to apps designed to help manage a therapy service in many of these key areas, these five are among some of the best right now.
Huge companies such as Forbes, Yahoo, Sage, and Time all use Due “to stay on time of time for maximum productivity and accurate billing.”
The New York Times even lists Due as one of the top time-tracking apps for freelancers.
The following reviews come from Compare Camp and G2:
Pros: “Due.com eliminates the need to deal with a complicated process to get started. To use the system, all you have to do is visit their website, find the form to sign up, and give the basic contact details it requires. You can see all the features and items like calendar and reports on the left side of Due’s dashboard screen, which is intuitive. Because of its easy-to-use dashboard, you do not need to spend a significant amount of time and effort in learning how to use the system.”
Cons: “The credit card processing fee seems high, but if you have a high volume of credit card invoices then it is worth it. There should be more customizability options for your invoices, giving them a more personal touch.”
Full Slate
If you are looking for an easy-to-use online appointment scheduling application, this one is worth checking out. Full Slate, founded in 2008, is the easiest way to fill your appointment book and take the stress out of scheduling. While you focus on providing great service, Full Slate works in the background to fill up your schedule.
Benefits of using Full Slate include:
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- The ability to book more appointments with online scheduling
- Sync appointments to Google calendar
- Option to collect credit card number, deposit or full payment to secure online booking
- Send automated reminders to clients through the app
- Set up repeating appointments
- Let multiple clients sign up for the same slot until you reach maximum capacity
- Sell certificates and prepaid packages
- Automatically collect feedback with option to publish ratings and reviews
- Manage business hours and shared staff across multiple locations
- Keep track of client info, appointment history and email correspondence in one place
Check out the website–they offer a free trial and are fairly inexpensive comparing other similar apps.
The following reviews come from Capterra:
Pros: “Ability to quickly set up patient scheduling and monitor bookings online without personally getting involved in the booking process myself.”
Cons: “It would be nice if we could customize the booking process a bit more so that we could adjust how we bill clients and merge two programs into one. Right now it doesn’t fully work for all that we need.”
Clinicians are constantly learning as new studies come to light, improvements in technology are made, and theories are proven. Trainings and professional developments are traditional ways in which therapists stay up-to-date. But why wait for required meetings to learn anything and everything new in the field of mental health?
Pocket’s slogan is “Put knowledge in your pocket,” and that is just what you need to do as a professional. With Pocket you can save content from anywhere; save articles, videos and stories from any publication, page or app. Curate your own space filled with everything you can’t wait to learn. Immerse yourself in great content anywhere – even offline. Read or listen without distraction, on any device.
They are backed by Vox, TED, Twitter, New York Times, YouTube, and Harvard Business Review. And Pocket is integrated into 1,500 plus apps for your convenience.
Did you read an article on Twitter or a peer-reviewed journal about a new therapy technique? Save it to Pocket and have it forever in one handy place.
Pocket is an Editor’s Choice in the Google Play store!
The following reviews come from Google Play:
Pros: “This app is AMAZING. No longer do I need to fill up my bookmark tab with articles I’ll never read, or let news notifications pile up in my inbox just because I can’t read them right away. With Pocket, I can just save everything into this handy little app and read it all in one go. I also love the read-aloud feature which reads articles out to you. It’s clear and well paced, and the overall UI is amazing. Possibly the best most useful app I have ever come across, a real gem for avid readers.”
Cons: “A few improvements that would make my life easier – (1) I want to pin some items in “My List”. These are items that I constantly keep coming back to and so I need them to be at the top of the list (2) The TTS needs to be more customised.”
Evernote
If you are seeking to improve your private practice productivity, Evernote is the app to download now. If you are not a pen and paper person or are looking to make the switch to digital for whatever reason, this is the solution to your problem, which is piles upon piles of paperwork, notebooks, and folders. You can even take notes via audio through the app and also forward important emails to store within the app. There is a document scanning feature and a template feature that will make your life more organized and less muddled.
Straight from the site:
Evernote is where ideas become answers, where individuals organize their daily lives, and where teams come to create and share work together.
Evernote is where you can store everything from personal moments to business projects, and know they’re always safe, always secure, and ready whenever you need them.
Evernote auto-syncs across all your devices, including desktop, smartphone, and tablet. Your ideas, photos, and clipped pages are always available, no matter where you are.
From birthdays to the boardroom, keep friends, family, and team members in on everything. Invite anyone to collaborate on whatever is on your mind.
The following reviews come from G2:
Pros: “The best feature is that the Evernote can be used on different devices, and all the data are synced to a single account in real-time. Besides, I love its flexibility to share notes digitally with various accessibility controls. Another fascinating aspect is that it also supports handwriting so that if you have a tablet with a pen, you can write in Evernote as you would normally write on paper.”
Cons: “The free edition has a very limited capacity of 60MB, so you must use the subscription version.”
Simple Practice
Are you tired of using multiple apps for getting different things done on a daily basis? Simple Practice “is the only practice management software that allows you to go fully virtual, in-office, or anywhere in-between. Integrated with telehealth, online booking, paperless intakes, and more.”
Popular features include:
- Easy website builder
- Video appointments
- Streamlined care
- Simple claim filing
- Fully HIPAA-compliant
- Digital organization
- Customizable templates
- Paperless payments
- On-the-go access
- World-class team
Simple practice seems super convenient for anyone who needs help managing their therapy practice.
The following reviews come from Capterra:
Pros: “The telehealth video/audio quality is very good. Their help database is one of the better ones I’ve seen, lots of great articles and clear instructions that seems to be kept up to date.”
Cons: “You can add your own but the default ones remain on the list. I reduced confusion by naming my templates in all-caps to avoid accidentally sending a client the wrong forms.”
Hootsuite
In these modern times where social media posts are ubiquitous, therapists need to jump on the bandwagon and learn how to promote themselves and share information through social media platforms. However, what if a therapist uses several social media platforms at once? Posting individually on each one can get time consuming and confusing. That is what Hootsuite is for. By downloading the app and connecting all of your social media accounts, you can post one time only and it will go out to all of them.
Things that Hootsuite can help you with…
- Sharing and schedule engaging content to your profiles
- Addressing incoming messages and delivering timely replies
- Staying informed about market trends and competitors
- Promoting your organic content and managing paid ads
- Measuring your results across all social networks
Whether you want to become an influencer or not, you can save time and a headache by using this app.
The following review comes from Capterra:
Pros: “What I like most about Hootsuite is the ease of using and configuring it. Thanks to its functions I can keep my company’s social networks active when I am not connected.”
Cons: “The interface is boring and old. And sometimes you lose connection with social media affecting your already programmed posts.”
Why use apps to help you manage your therapy practice?
Using an app to manage your therapy practice is definitely a good idea. There is so much that technology can offer today in 2021 that we didn’t have even a few years ago. While some people are simply paper, pencil, and planner notebook-type people–and there is nothing wrong with that–there are numerous therapists out there that will benefit from these organizational/business apps.
Using these apps can help with helping you to be more flexible, transparent, organized and engaged, to be able to provide resources, and to conduct business transactions.
Go click on each link to the 5 apps, browse their sites with reviews and pricing, and see what you think. Some offer free trials, which is worth it if you are even considering using one. Download one and get the feel for it. If it’s not for you, simply delete.
Good luck app hunting!
ABA Programs Guide Staff
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