Medical Billing Forum
Medical Billing Software => Medical Billing Software Reviews => : dtru@tmedbilling.com June 25, 2012, 11:08:43 PM
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Does anyone have any experience with Practice Mate? Can you share your experiences with me? I got an account with them, and am dismayed at how cumbersome it is, and I am hoping that there are many shortcuts I just am not aware of yet. I would like to pay someone to consult with me on the program.
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Sorry, we use office ally but not practice mate. Did you try calling them? They should be willing to do either training or a demo.
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Their website says they have free and unlimited support and training. ::) http://www.officeally.com/products_services.aspx?id=67
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I use the Practice Mate portion for my clients. It it easy to use once you get hang of it.I NEVER pay for training and it is FREE. If you need them to show you how to do something call the tech support or call for a half hour or full hour of training.
It is very easy compared to other softwares.
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When I was leading UnitedHealthcare's EDI team we would ALWAYS promote Office Ally due to the cost, FREE, and the each of use, along with the free 24/7 customer service. I looked up the contact info for you also!
Call 1-866-575-4120
Email support@officeally.com
I highly recomend it.
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I don't personally use their pm but I know others that do and they don't like the fact that the claims need to be submitted exclusively to them (of course unless you print them out and mail them).The drawback in using them for EDI claims is that there is a higher than normal rate of claims that have issues or get lost in a black hole.
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The clearinghouse part (OA) is pretty good for a free clearinghouse. It is even better than some of the paid clearinghouses. As for PracticeMate, it is TERRIBLE. I am constantly amazed at what people will put themselves through for something free. It is like the people that stand in line for an hour for a free hamburger or something like that, when the hamburger only costs $5 and the person makes more than three times that amount per hour at their job. Waiting in line for an hour for a free $5 hamburger makes no sense when you could work that same hour and make $20. JMO. I'll get off my soapbox now. ;)
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Yes I have been using Practice Mate for two years now. The good news is the software and tech support is free. The down side is it is tedious and bill on and I haven't really found any short cuts. Most importantly it only holds two months worth of revenue data. So say your doc wants to know everything He or She brought for this year. Practice Mate will only go back to October first. So import all info to excel then print my monthly reports. If my doc asks these kind of questions, then I have the print outs at my fingertips. The aging reports are not that great either. Whenever I start to complain, my husband says as that famous song entitled "Rubber Biscuit".......what do you want for nothing.
Hope this helps. I cannot afford fancy exspensive software so I am stuck with it for now.
Happy Billing :)
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Most importantly it only holds two months worth of revenue data
SERIOUSLY? Oh my no way would that work for me, that's completely unacceptable and I couldn't and wouldn't services with a program like that at all.
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which Practice Mate reports do you find to be the most useful to give to the doctors?
thanks!
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surfergirl said: Most importantly it [Practice Mate] only holds two months worth of revenue data. So say your doc wants to know everything He or She brought for this year.
In Practice Mate, I just clicked on the "Accounting Tab", clicked on the "Reports" heading on the right side of the screen, and clicked on "Payments/Deposit" report. Then, on the left side of the screen, I clicked the drop-down arrow at "Payment Received:" and selected "By Month". I type in "01 - 2012" and clicked on "Go" Practice Mate gave me the a report that showed the total amount posted for every day in that month, plus a total for the entire month at the bottom.
I re-did the exercise in the previous paragraph, but selected "By Date Range", and then typed in "01-01-2012" to "12-31-2012". I received an error message asking me to limit my range to within 31 days. So I did "01-01-2012" to "01-31-12" and received the same results as stated in the previous paragraph.
The data is there (if it has been posted). You just get it one month at a time. The data can be exported to Excel, one month at a time, if you want to create a report for a number of months on one page.
It makes sense that a free program might have limited storage space - so I expect that there will be a cutoff at some point in the past beyond which Practice Mate will delete the data. But I have seen nothing in print that states what this cutoff date might be. Anyone who intends to use Practice Mate as their primary billing program for a while would be wise to export financial data to Excel on some regular schedule.
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It makes sense that a free program might have limited storage space - so I expect that there will be a cutoff at some point in the past beyond which Practice Mate will delete the data. But I have seen nothing in print that states what this cutoff date might be. Anyone who intends to use Practice Mate as their primary billing program for a while would be wise to export financial data to Excel on some regular schedule.
To me it doesn't make sense unless they have a cap with data to which, when you exceed you pay a fee.. that would make sense to me. But because of record retention, audit's and audit trails it doesn't make any sense to me to use a PM system that cuts off data, free or not, to use that would be a disservice to your company and the physicians you service. Not trying to lecture, but I do think a lot of billing companies cut corners with cost forgoing responsibility to their very resource of referrals (current clients).
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If I were a provider and knew my billing service didn't have access to all my data and couldn't get me the reports I needed I would drop my billing service in a heartbeat. PracticeMate is not worth free and hopefully billing services that have been trusted with a practices' data will realize that. It is one thing if the doctor makes the decision themselves but the billing service is just playing with fire. There are very good inexpensive options out there. Look around.
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PracticeMate is not worth free ...
PracticeMate / Office Ally is pushed at the moment by several national-level insurance carriers - so some folks don't agree with your statement. I would say that it is certainly suitable for those doctors who practice uncomplicated medicine.
I mentioned data retention just to be realistic. Office Ally is paid mostly by the insurance carriers, so maybe they are rolling in dough and can afford a large-enough server farm. But if they keep growing at the current rate, I'm thinking that at some point the data-storage requirement might exceed their ability and/or desire to pay for it. And my caution to make backups of the financial data applies to any practice mangement / billing sotware that you might use that is not physically located on your own servers. You never know when misundertandings between you and the offsite company, or EMPs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse might separate you from your data.
From personal experience, I can say that many doctors don't care about what reports the practice management software can generate. A number of my clients pay no attention to the reports that I give them. They know how much money they are putting in the bank (they do their own deposits, not us), they know how many patients they want to see in a week, and so they just put down their heads and work.
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From personal experience, I can say that many doctors don't care about what reports the practice management software can generate. A number of my clients pay no attention to the reports that I give them. They know how much money they are putting in the bank (they do their own deposits, not us), they know how many patients they want to see in a week, and so they just put down their heads and work.
Well, I want your clients. LOL. I go beyond billing, offering my clients my expertise including, but not limited to FULL credentialing with contract/fee schedule negotiation so reports for them and me are IMPERATIVE. If I am working with a client who's PM System I am accessing remote, before I sign with them I analyze the reporting area VERY carefully so that I can not only give them fair and accurate pricing, but I need to know WHAT services I can provide in addition to billing that will help their practice. If I go into the reporting area and I can't pull data to analyze a carrier's payment trend for at least 5 years, I can't offer them the extension of those services. My clients love that because I'm not just working on TODAY, I'm working for tomorrow and helping them keep up with the industry to make sure they are current and in or out of networks that benefit their practice not weigh them down. Many providers need to see the last 5 years in trending carrier payments for example, Medicaid. By pulling the right report I can analyze that along with the practice's payable and show them how they actually LOSE money by taking Medicaid (based on example of one of my clients)
Aside from those PERKS.. there is the simplest reason we need to RETAIN data.. Audit and Audit Trail. I have indeed walked away from clients who's PM system is substandard and cannot give me what I need to do my job, and they are unwilling to make a change. Doesn't happen often, for most part my clients are all pretty good about maintaining good quality PM systems.
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... offering my clients ... FULL credentialing with contract/fee schedule negotiation ...
... Many providers need to see the last 5 years in trending carrier payments ...
I thought the question concerned monthly reports, and an ocassional year-to-date report. My response was about those kinds of reports. We also do credentialing and fee-schedule negotiation, along with other practice management kinds of data mining. However, credentialing has been a one-time deal for us for any given doctor with any given carrier (haven't needed to re-credential a given doctor with a carrier he is already credentialed with). And fee-schedule negotiation for a given carrier does not happen on a monthly basis for us. So - for potential billers who maybe don't know yet - there is a distinct difference between monthly reports and other infrequent reports that need to pull data from the database.
My experience with Office Ally and Practice Mate comes only from one client who was using Practice Mate when we took him on. I have since moved him over to our software because Practice Mate did not meet our needs for keeping notes on patients and generating reports.
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I was referencing the limited data cap of software. I wouldn't be able to work with a database that capped out of data retention. When I setup a client I let them tell me what reports they want to see monthly, quarterly and annually. I like doing this as you can tell how much a provider is involved with their practice by them telling you what they want to see and Why. My clients will also occasionally ask me for a specific report for one reason or another. I am also speaking of consulting only clients as well to which I never know what they are going to want me to pull or how far back it will need to go. I was making reference to the fact that I just would not use a software that limited my ability of capturing data. IF a software has a limit there SHOULD be a data export option. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but it would bother me that one day you could hit some limit and "poof" it's gone.
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IF a software has a limit there SHOULD be a data export option.
As I noted in a previous post above, Practice Mate does have that option. The dinosaur software I am currently using has that option. So I imagine most billing software would have a similar option.
... it would bother me that one day you could hit some limit and "poof" it's gone.
Bothers me too. Which is why I am not really comfortable with all the push to use cloud billing services. The biller and the doctor do not control the decision re whether to make the data disappear. Another consideration is this: Some cloud services state in the contract you sign that the data belongs to them. If you decide to leave for another service, you will receive an age report so you can work your accounts receivable. But all the historical data is theirs. You won't get it. So how then do you do your 5-year trend on what ins. carriers have paid - if you switch to another cloud billing service, or get your own billing software? You don't.
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