Editorial rating:
TherapyAppointment is a patient management system (PMS) that is designed for use by therapists and other mental healthcare practices. It provides solutions for managing client charts, documenting clinical notes, telehealth, insurance billing, and tracking business data. Pricing for TherapyAppointment is based on the number of monthly appointments and varies from $10 to $59+ monthly.
Rating of TherapyAppointment’s EHR
I have dedicated a great deal of time and attention to each EHR platform that I review. My goal is to help you make decisions that will guide your practice into helping as many people as possible while avoiding as many administrative hiccups as possible. I’ve spent countless hours using some of the best EHRs available, and also some of the worst. Throughout my time in private practice and community mental healthcare, I’ve learned what differentiates a great EHR from all the rest. After carefully reviewing and extensively testing the TherapyAppointment platform over a 2 week period, I found that it is an exceptionally well-made piece of software. TherapyAppointment excels in automating repetitive tasks and saving practitioners precious time and effort in their documentation. As such, it performed well in client forms and intake management, and calendar and scheduling. TherapyAppointment is not as old as some of its competitors, so it scored a bit lower in the reliability and longevity category. As well, TherapyAppoinment is lacking in key customization features in treatment and notetaking, so scored lower in this category, as well.
Pros & Cons of TherapyAppointment
The greatest aspect of TherapyAppointment is its friendliness toward new and growing practices. Rather than hide premium features behind various pricing tiers, TherapyAppointment is based on client caseload and the number of appointments held each month. This allows new or small practices to access top-shelf features, without a high cost of entry.
TherapyAppointment provides an intuitive and sleek patient management system (PMS) to help reduce the common administrative pains felt by mental and behavioral health practitioners. Compared to premium options like SimplePractice, TherapyAppointment offers much of the same functionality at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, compared to more traditional services like CounSol, TherapyAppointment offers a breath of fresh air in terms of modernity and design quality. I’m particularly fond of TherapyAppointment. It recently earned a spot on our list of the best mental health EHRs and won awards as the best mental health EHR overall.
How to Sign Up for TherapyAppointment
Users can sign up by visiting the TherapyAppointment website and following the directions to sign up for the free trial. The trial does require the input of a credit card, but there is no upfront charge.
What is TherapyAppointment?
TherapyAppointment offers all of the features that practices have come to expect in a mental health PMS in an intuitive, and, perhaps, most importantly, affordable package. In terms of design, it seems like TherapyAppointment borrows several motifs from SimplePractice, with both pieces of software looking and feeling very similar. By its design, and the verbiage on its website, TherapyAppointment is heavily marketed toward new and growing practices.
TherapyAppointment seems to have been designed with automation at the forefront. It boasts a robust array of features that make managing a practice easy and straightforward. For example, whenever you finish documenting a client’s session, the system automatically generates and bills the client based on the CPT code. Clients can then pay their fees online with no further input from the practitioner. To top it off, all of this information and the progress of each step can be tracked from the main dashboard.
TherapyAppointment is one of our favorite EHRs. In our review of the best mental health EHRs, we gave it the award for best EHR overall, as well as for telehealth practices, and practices on a budget.
TherapyAppointment Key Features
A few key features that TherapyAppointment offers are its client management system, calendar system with automated appointment scheduling, client portal, internal messaging system, insurance billing, payment collection and processing, and a very handy data analytics dashboard. Base prices range from $10-$59 monthly.
Client Management
Client management is easy and straightforward in TherapyAppointment. Client data is organized in a meaningful way and is easily accessible through multiple user flows in the system. There are multiple methods of filtering clients, including by therapist, office location, date of birth, and insurance, all of which would make organizing large caseloads easy.
Thankfully, TherapyAppointment does include functionality for importing large amounts of client information in a streamlined way. This can be basic information like names and DOBs, or more detailed information like insurance carriers. To accomplish this, a practitioner simply downloads a custom spreadsheet template, inputs the client data in the required format, and uploads the file to TherapyAppointment, whereupon they will be greeted with all of their client’s demographic information.
TherapyAppointment allows practices to assign various permissions to different staff members, including records custodians, billers, and schedulers. All of these have varying degrees of access to client information to help secure client privacy.
One feature that I have not encountered in any other mental health PMS is the ability to fax records and chart information directly within the system. No costly fax machine is needed. This would allow coordination with outside agencies to be conducted very quickly and efficiently. Because of its ease of use, TherapyAppointment has earned 5 out of 5 stars in the “Client Management” category of our scoring criteria.
Client Forms & Intake
TherapyAppointment has a highly automated and customizable intake process for clients. Access to a huge array of pre-built forms is included with the cost of the subscription and is far and away more exhaustive than any other PMS I’ve tested. Anything from PHI releases to the more obscure clinical assessments can be found here, and, in the event, you have a need that isn’t covered, the custom form builder is robust and easy to use. Any practitioner that has had to spend painstaking time manually creating and entering client forms knows that this is a huge boon.
Forms can be set up to be automatically assigned to different clients or can be manually assigned case-by-case for each client. Regardless, the forms are sent directly to the client portal, where the client can then complete them with no needed intervention from staff. This automated intake process is much appreciated, as it ensures practitioners have ready access to the clinical and psychosocial information they need at the very first contact.
Within the client portal, clients are able to freely access and change their demographic information, and also have access to a very useful internal messaging system. In the event they have trouble during intake, they would be able to message their therapist or another staff member directly. Because of its simplicity, TherapyAppointment has earned 5 out of 5 stars in the “Client Forms & Intake” category of our scoring criteria.
Scheduling
Scheduling in TherapyAppointment can be handled in a few ways. Appointments can be scheduled at any time from within the client’s demographics page, or appointments can also be requested by the client from their client portal. This takes into account pre-established availability for the given office, and this feature can be turned on or off given specific clients or situations.
TherapyAppointment offers automatic appointment reminders that can be sent to clients via text message or email, which can be easily enabled or disabled depending on preference. These reminders are free-of-charge with all subscription plans which is definitely an outlier policy among these systems. TherapyNotes and SimplePractice both charge extra for the same feature.
It’s worth noting that time zones in reminders reflect the practice’s default setting, however, they do make clear mention of what time zone is being used – however, it could still be overlooked by a client, which could lead to scheduling mixups.
In my time using TherapyAppointment, I found the calendar system to be adequate and easy to use. It’s easy to set up rules and automations, as well as syncing your practice calendar with any Google calendar. The calendar system also includes a few odds and ends that should make running a practice a bit smoother. Directly from the appointment view, staff members can print work or school excuses and write quick administrative notes. Coupled with the ability to easily confirm appointments and check-in clients for the session, TherapyAppointment would make running a busy practice relatively easy. Because of its excellent design, TherapyAppointment has earned 5 out of 5 stars in the “Calendar & Scheduling” category of our scoring criteria.
Treatment Planning & Notes
Templates for treatment plans and progress notes are not nearly as in-depth out of the box as intake forms. Treatment plan templates are a bit clunky, and the most useful one is hidden within the SOAP note template – I had to consult the help guide to find this, as the information was not made readily available. Once found, the template proved adequate for the needs of most clients. At the start, the only other treatment plan template available is simply a free-writing text box.
Progress note templates are similarly limited with only a handful of options to choose from – none of which are particularly groundbreaking. Thankfully, TherapyAppointment does offer the ability to customize progress note templates, albeit in a rather limited manner. Customizing templates is unintuitive and requires a bit of ingenuity in terms of formatting. Ultimately, I feel like someone with a limited skill set in computers and EHR software may have a bit of trouble, but TherapyAppointment does offer some guides for managing this.
I felt like the documentation capabilities in TherapyAppointment were glaringly sub-par. In fact, it really felt like they were an afterthought when the system was designed. It would be nice to see TherapyAppointment refresh these systems to be more competitive with something like SimplePractice which makes the notetaking process as intuitive and simple as it possibly can be. But, for the price, TherapyAppointment will definitely get the job done – just maybe not as quickly. Due to its limitations, TherapyAppointment has earned a score of 3 out of 5 stars in the “Treatment Planning & Notetaking” category of our scoring criteria.
Telehealth
Rather than attempt to build a custom video platform from scratch, TherapyAppointment partnered with Zoom (surely, you’ve heard of them) to provide a HIPAA compliant telehealth solution.
I have used my fair share of telehealth platforms – especially since the pandemic – and this is one of the best. Most PMS providers elect to create some sort of proprietary software or integration, which feels as though it inevitably leads to lower quality tech.
TherapyAppointment, on the other hand, with its partnership with Zoom Health provides all of the premium functionality of Zoom with the HIPAA compliance and privacy you expect out of a PMS. Some premium features on offer include the ability to create breakout rooms, easily share a screen or request a client’s screen, share documents, chat, record meetings, or get live AI-assisted transcription.
Zoom Health also supports group sessions with multiple clients, multiple providers, or both, which would allow practices to easily offer remote group or family therapy, as well as facilitate support groups. There is no documented limit to the number of participants.
Telehealth is one of the only features that is not included in the base price of TherapyAppointment. It costs $15 monthly per practitioner. With its many features, TherapyAppointment earned 5 out of 5 stars in the “Telehealth” category of our scoring criteria.
Insurance Billing
TherapyAppointment does an admirable job of handling insurance billing. Out of all the systems I’ve worked with, TherapyAppointment stands out as one of the simplest to manage when it comes to submitting and monitoring insurance claims. There is an optional feature that can be enabled that enables the PMS to automatically create and send insurance claims as soon as an appointment has been documented.
The practice dashboard has several key metrics that it tracks – one of these being the status of outstanding insurance claims. Other key tracking areas include problems with insurance information or pre-certs, as well as any updates from the clearinghouse that TherapyAppointment uses, which is OfficeAlly.
Insurance claims are relatively affordable, $0.17 per claim, which is mostly competitive with other systems on the market. For comparison, SimplePractice offers users a few free claims each month, and then charges $0.25 per claim thereafter. If your practice only bills insurance for a few clients, then this shouldn’t be too large of an expenditure. If your practice is already set up with a clearinghouse, you can integrate it with TherapyAppointment at no extra cost. Eligibility checks with TherapyAppointment cost $0.07 per lookup. Because of its wealth of features, TherapyAppointment has earned 4.5 out of 5 stars in the “Insurance Billing” category of our scoring criteria.
Client Payment Methods, Collection, & Processing
TherapyAppointment allows practices to easily manage their payment collection and processing. Clients can pay through credit card, debit card, FSA or HSA. Practices have the option of linking an existing third-party processor account like T-SYS or International Bancard. If a practice isn’t already set up with an account, TherapyAppointment will handle this with its partnership with International Bancard at a rate advertised “as low as 2.89% plus $0.10 per transaction.” These rates are locked in for three years, barring any industry regulatory changes.
If a practice chooses to let TherapyAppointments and its partner manage payment processing, a physical payment terminal is included at no-cost, which allows physical practices to easily accept card payments without investing in additional equipment.
Of course, practices can always use any other external card processor of their choice, and simply document this within TherapyAppointment – the same goes for cash or check payments.
Aside from the ability for clients to pay through the client portal, TherapyAppointment offers a pretty standard assortment of features for a mental health PMS when it comes to billing and payment. Because of its stellar features, TherapyAppointment has earned 5 out of 5 stars in the “Client Payment Methods, Collection, & Processing” category of our scoring criteria.
Practice Management & Reports
Group Practices:
For group practices, TherapyAppointment offers a nice selection of helpful tools. These include an internal messaging system that allows staff to communicate with one another, as well as with clients directly. These messages can also include attachments which can easily be saved to a client’s chart.
Different staff members can be assigned various levels of access to the PMS, which helps streamline practice management and ensure that client data is protected and private. Roles that can be assigned include therapist or other clinical staff, managers, schedulers, billers, and records custodians. The latter of which seems particularly useful for a dedicated compliance specialist or auditor.
Solo Practices:
For both solo and group practices, TherapyAppointment offers functionality for data analytics and reporting. Instead of making this a premium feature like SimplePractice does, TherapyAppointment includes a data analytics dashboard in the price of any plan.
The functionality of the analytics dashboard is pretty robust. It includes options for tracking trends in client demographics, cash inflow and outflow, accounts receivable, and insurance reimbursements. The dashboard also allows practices to monitor their usage of features such as insurance claims and eligibility checks and how much this has been costing the practice. There are also useful features for auditing client charts and managing recordkeeping compliance. Due to this, TherapyAppointment has earned 4.5 out of 5 stars in the “Practice Management & Reports” category of our scoring criteria.
Customer Service & Training
Throughout my time working with TherapyAppointment, I didn’t run across many issues that required the assistance of the help guides, and intervention from customer service was never necessary. Nonetheless, TherapyAppointment offers a nice FAQ and help center that can help users solve any problems they encounter on their own.
As well, TherapyAppointment offers a wide range of onboarding and tutorial videos, and written guides for getting your practice set up. Unlike some other options, it doesn’t seem like TherapyAppointment offers any live webinars or onboarding calls. TherapyAppoinyment has earned 4 out of 5 stars in the “Customer Service & Training” category of our scoring criteria.
How Much Does TherapyAppointment Cost?
TherapyAppointment base prices are $10 monthly for less than 10 appointments per month, $39 monthly for 11-49 appointments, and $59 monthly for unlimited appointments. Additional practitioners can be added at a rate of $39 monthly per practitioner if a practice is on the unlimited plan. Additional practitioners only cost $10 monthly if they have fewer than 10 sessions in a month.
Pricing is refreshingly different from many other PMS providers. Rather than lock premium features behind a paywall, all users get access to every feature that TherapyAppointment has on offer. Instead, pricing is based on the number of appointments conducted per month.
TherapyAppointment Add-Ons & Other Fees
For an additional fee, TherapyAppointment offers these premium features:
- Credit card processing – 2.89% plus $0.10 per transaction
- Insurance claims – $0.17 per claim
- Additional telehealth practitioners – $15 monthly per practitioner
Who is TherapyAppointment Right For?
TherapyAppointment has a lot going for it. It’s particularly well-suited to small practices because of its pricing model, but larger practices can also get a great degree of functionality for a relatively low price. Telehealth practices would greatly benefit from TherapyAppointment’s integration with Zoom Health. With it’s excellent features, TherapyAppointment earned a place on our list of the best mental health EHRs.
Small or New Practices
TherapyAppointment is a particularly alluring option for practices with small caseloads. Practices that are just starting out and have fewer than 10 sessions per month can get started for $10 monthly, which is incredibly cheap for mental health patient management systems. Granted, your practice is going to grow and that cost will increase, but it’s a great place to start.
Telehealth Practices
TherapyAppointment offers the most robust telehealth platform that I’ve seen out of any mental health PMS. Its partnership with Zoom Health gives it an unprecedented amount of features and a level of stability that’s hard to beat.
Practices Migrating from Other Systems
If you are currently shopping around for a new PMS and have a large client caseload to bring over, then TherapyAppointments can meet your needs well – at least in terms of migration. Importing large batches of detailed client information is very easy and intuitive.
Who May Want an Alternative to TherapyAppointment?
While TherapyAppointment does have a lot to offer, there are a few types of users that may not find it to be the best solution. For instance, TherapyAppointment does not offer electronic prescription support, and customization is difficult and unintuitive.
Psychiatric Providers or Medication Prescribers
Medication providers will be disappointed to know that TherapyAppointment does not currently offer any sort of functionality for electronic prescriptions. Those that wish to provide e-prescriptions would have to use an external service to manage this or use an EHR that has electronic prescription features, such as CounSol.com. To learn more about CounSol.com’s features, you can read our comprehensive review of CounSol.com
Practices that Need a Lot of Customization
Customizations in TherapyAppointment – specifically with treatment plans and progress notes – are neither easy nor pleasant to implement. Practices that aren’t happy with the out of the box templates that are available, may find TherapyAppointment inadequate in this realm. An alternative that offers a great deal more customization is SimplePractice. To learn more about SimplePractice’s features, you can read our comprehensive review of SimplePractice.
What Users Are Saying About TherapyAppointment
Across multiple user review aggregate sites, TherapyAppointment tends to garner relatively high praise. It is important to look at a variety of user review sites to get a full picture of what is being said. When we look at a few of our trusted sources, we can see a few trends that stand out for what users have to say.
The Good:
Very Low Cost
Users consistently praise TherapyAppointment’s low entry price – especially for new practices and startups, but even the most expensive plan is very affordable.
Intuitive Calendar and Scheduling
Many users mentioned that the TherapyAppointment’s calendar system is very easy to use, and that delegating scheduling to staff members is very easy. Users particularly enjoy being able to see a daily availability without having to view the entire calendar at once.
Easy to Learn and Quick to Implement
A common theme among user reviews for TherapyAppointment is that setting up the system – even for a well-established practice – is easy to do, and most users found the system intuitive and easy to learn.
The Bad:
Customer Support is Spotty
Several users noted that customer support can be slow and unhelpful. Users specifically critiqued the transition from the TherapyAppointment legacy system to the new one.
Occasional Software Glitches
Some users noted that TherapyAppointment can be glitchy at times, but the nature of these glitches was not discussed, and very well could be isolated incidents.
TherapyAppointment Vs. SimplePractice
SimplePractice and TherapyAppointment offer a very similar set of features. In general, a user is able to accomplish just about anything that SimplePractice can do by using TherapyAppointment – and can do so at a much lower cost. Many of the “premium” features that SimplePractice offers are included in the cost of TherapyAppointment.
TherapyAppointment fills the void that SimplePractice left when it stopped being as supportive and price-friendly to new practices. Many users have criticized SimplePractice’s focus toward bigger practices, whereas TherapyAppointment keeps small business as its key audience.
A few features that SimplePractice does excel a bit more in than TherapyAppointment include customization, as well as integration with business websites, and customer support.
For a deeper look at our thoughts, take a look at our SimplePractice review.
TherapyAppointment Vs. TherapyNotes
TherapyAppointment and TherapyNotes, aside from having similar names, are also somewhat similar in design. However, a big and notable difference, is that TherapyNotes seems to have been designed expressly for the purpose of speed of implementation – as long as that implementation doesn’t involve importing a lot of clients. TherapyNotes has great out of the box functionality, but is similarly flawed in customization as TherapyAppointment is, but does not offer bulk client imports.
One area that TherapyNotes is a bit ahead of TherapyAppointment is its support for electronic prescriptions. Psychiatric practices and medication providers are much better supported by TherapyNotes than by TherapyAppointment.
For a deeper look at our thoughts, take a look at our TherapyNotes review.
History of TherapyAppointment
According to TherapyAppointment’s FAQs, the company has been developing their software for over 15 years. In this time, they have amassed a following of over 20,000 therapists. TherapyAppointment was founded by a private practice psychologist, after finding the practice management software at the time to be inadequate.
TherapyAppointment operates under the moniker of Psych Select Software, LLC and is currently headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. An overview of the company and its employees can be found on TherapyAppointment’s LinkedIn page.
FAQ’s
How Do I Cancel My TherapyAppointment Subscription?
According to the TherapyAppointment help center, simply log in as the practice owner, navigate to the settings menu, select “practice settings”, and finally, select “deactivate account.” 1
Does TherapyAppointment Offer Refunds?
No. Since TherapyAppointment offers a full month free trial, the company does not offer refunds.
Please visit the TherapyAppointment Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for more information.
Is TherapyAppointment Cloud-Based?
Yes, TherapyAppointment, like most mental health patient management systems, is cloud-based. This means that no patient information is stored locally on your computer, and that the system requires you to be connected to the internet to access the software. However, being cloud-based does have the benefit of allowing you to access the software from wherever you are, even from a smartphone.
Does TherapyAppointment Have a Client Portal?
Yes. TherapyAppointment includes access to a client portal at all subscription levels. This feature can be enabled or disabled on a client-by-client basis.
Is TherapyAppointment Good for Telehealth?
In my experience, TherapyAppointment offers some of the best telehealth functionality available out of any mental health PMS.
TherapyAppointment Final Verdict
Overall, I was very impressed with TherapyAppointment. Aside from a lack of some improvements to the core of the system’s customization options, I feel like TherapyAppointment would be very useful for both small and large practices. TherapyAppointment has a huge amount of functionality, especially considering the cost relative to other options available.
You should consider signing up for TherapyAppointment’s free trial if you:
- Are looking for a lot of features with a low cost
- Need a great telehealth solution
- Don’t need a lot of customization for treatment plans and progress note templates
You should consider looking for an alternative to TherapyAppointment if you:
- Need a PMS that offers electronic prescriptions (TherapyNotes is a great alternative)
- Need to be able to customize treatment plan and note templates easily
- Prefer a non-automated intake system
