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.