Should I Get Therapist Helper?
Get out from under the paper!
Should I Get Therapist Helper?
Therapist Helper is an industry standard software package designed to help therapists and psychiatrists manage their billing. It’s also pretty expensive! Is it worth the cost for your office to switch to Therapist Helper?
In order to answer this question, one thing I would ask is, what billing system are you using now? How efficient is it? Are you able to electronically submit your billing? How many people will you be billing for – just yourself, or the entire office?
If you or your billing manager are submitting paper claims to each individual insurance company by hand, then Therapist Helper could be a godsend. It allows you to batch up all of your sessions and bill them out electronically to the insurance companies, using a transaction service like Office Ally. Just being able to submit your bills with a few mouse clicks may save you enough hours to make the Therapist Helper price tag worth it!
However, if you are only considering using it for yourself, then it may not be worth the cost. Therapist Helper is designed for a multi-therapist office, which has to track thousands of patients across scores of clinicians. Put simply, Therapist Helper may be a lot more firepower than you need!
In the ideal set-up, several people are sharing one instance of Therapist Helper. For example, you would have it installed and running on one single computer in your office. (That saves on license fees!) You and everyone else in your office submit your dates of service weekly. A billing manager then enters everyone’s service dates at once, and submits all the bills to all of the insurance companies.
In a case like this, the cost of Therapist Helper can be spread across several different people. And although you may have to pay to have a billing specialist come in and submit everything, the time savings alone will be worth it. Not to mention the frustration of having to learn Therapist Helper yourself!
Therapist Helper is great once you know how to use it. If you don’t already know, are you willing to spend dozens (maybe hundreds) of hours finding your way around the system? It can be pretty complicated! Honestly, unless you live for this kind of challenge, your time is probably better spent elsewhere.
Comments
Therapist Helper review
Pros:
Powerful Program that does a very good job in storing medical data and printing insurance claims on paper HCFA forms
Easy to use
Good Customer Service
Cons:
Only allows you to use their own electronic claims submission company instead of giving the customer freedom to choose of which electronic claims submission company they want to use (this is a severe flaw in Helper)
This is a very rigid program that requires you to work with it rather than it work with you
With the shift to ICD10 Helper has become extremely slow when selecting a diagnosis. (Another major flaw).
We have used Helper for printing paper HCFA forms for over 20 years and been very happy with Helper. We would have recommended Helper to others. Since the slowness of entering a diagnosis has happened with ICD10, we stopped recommending Helper. As a result of not allowing the use of other electronic claims submission companies we have completely stopped recommending Helper.
I am a solo practice and do not take insurance (s0 don't need electronic billing), but am in need of a software program for scheduling, billing accounts, electronic progress notes. Would Therapist Helper work for me? If not, any suggestions?
I am using Helper at a very easy pace. I am now trying to figure out how to begin adding payments: example---- Have had a client Sue who has been coming for 6 months. Her insurance has sent me reimbursements but I never entered into the program. Now I would like to start doing that with the next reimbursement check. Can I do that?
There are many things I really love about Therapist Helper and I have used it for many many years now. I am rather frustrated with Brand software now because they seem completely unwilling to consider apps for I phones or even androids that would make life easier. In the dinosaur age I used traveller with a palm pilot but that is just ridiculous now. The software company does not even respond when asked questions about portability. This leaves me wondering if they will just fade out completely very soon.
I have been using Helper for 14 years with few minor problems that were corrected with updates. I do not use the complete functionality but do use a lot of the program. I am a single practice office. Helper isn't considering an application for Ipad or other smartphone. That doesn't make me happy. When I bought the product I also bought the Palm application because I wanted travel access to my clients and the schedule. Of course, who uses a Palm???!!!
Service has improved over the years, they used to be very cranky. I think that the Helper sales office in Stoneham MA is gone and I heard rumors that the program may be fazed out However they did just post a major upgrade????
I am trying to print out end of the year reports. Every time i fun them, I keep getting different information!! Anyone have any idea why??
I have an old version of Therapist Helper (199?) that I haven't accessed in years. I tried to retrieve some data today and have forgotten my password. The email I registered expired in 2000 so I can't request a new one. Any suggestions?
I am trying to set up a "test file" for claims and no one will assist me?! Does anyone have any ideas?
WARNING!!!!!!
We recently added a new billing person and decided to switch to Delphi because helper was not user friendly and lacked some direct billing options, such as easy 30, 60, 90 and 120 days, and past due. However, before we stopped using it, our accountant looked at the billing and suggested we weren't making enough according to their reports. So we delved into our records and compared them to helper. What we found was frightening! Hundreds, I repeat hundreds, of sessions of which we had notes in a clients file for a session that were not in Helper.
At first, we thought it was our last billing person having been delinquent, but then we saw that there were plenty of missing sessions from the previous two billing people. Additionally, before we completed the migration to Delphi, we noticed the new person missed a couple of sessions she specifically remembers inputting, not to mention a cadre of other missing appointments she is pretty sure she put in. We are now testing therapist helper to see if this continues even though we have switched to Delphi.
Now, we are spending lots of time comparing file notes with sessions billed by helper and inputting everything into Delphi so we have an accurate record. Further, for those sessions that were missing from Helper, we are now billing those from the last year and then attempting to bill older sessions after that.
Next, I suppose, we will be looking for other offices who have had similar circumstances and decide whether to file a class action.
So beware.
BTW - Though we are new to Delphi, we found, that unlike Helper, their customer service is wonderful. They even helped us install it and test it before we bought it.
- AUTHOR
Great point about being able to just use the parts you really need, and ignore the more complicated bits!
Support does leave a bit to be desired, and the lack of an 800 number for support to such a huge and expensie prograsm seems silly. The learning curve is quite steep, there are still several parts of it that I don't know how to use. That said, it can be used peicemeal, that is, use the simple parts and add in more as you learn. The trick is not to stop learning. Otherwise you may find yourself becoming frustrated with it. Oh, and it works fine on windoze 7, 64-bit.
Support is terrible; only in weekdays; no 800 phone number; no windows 7 x64 version
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