Mental Health Software For Practice Management and Billing

There can be a lot going on backstage when you run your own therapy or mental health practice. If you want to help more clients while increasing your revenue, digitalizing at least some of your processes is essential.

This article will help you find the best mental health software for your specific practice so that you can save time and energy while scaling up your client list and your income.

What Is Mental Health Software?

Mental health software is any digital tool or platform that supports the needs of your mental health practice, whether you’re a self-employed therapist or work in a general hospital.

It does this by providing you with tools and features to simplify critical processes involved in your day-to-day work, for example:

• Treatment planning
• Client interactions
• Patient engagement
• Marketing or outreach, and
• Practice administration

Essentially, good mental health software enables you to automate “behind the scenes” tasks that must be done—but which don’t relate to your core expertise of helping others.

Because these tasks can add up considerably as your client list and workload grows, finding the right app is important if you want to scale up your practice sustainably.

Mental health software enables you to automate “behind the scenes” tasks that must be done—but which don’t relate to your core expertise of helping others.

5 Benefits of Therapy Software For Professionals

There are many ways that mental health software can improve the way you work, depending on your needs and those of your clients.

Some benefits apply to all practitioners, however, regardless of your niche or specialty:

1. Improved treatment quality: Mental health software allows you to focus on what you excel at: helping others. Spending less time on client admin, follow-up, and prep work frees up space for creativity and better treatments that will ultimately generate better results for those you help.
2. More practice efficiency: By automating repetitive tasks (e.g., onboarding and collecting assessment data), you can take on more clients without working additional unpaid hours. Software like Quenza is a great example, because you can use it to design versatile treatment plan templates and customize them to suit each new client.
3. Increased scalability: Some software solutions allow you to deliver group therapy programs, self-paced courses, and other one-to-many solutions. With Quenza Groups, for instance, you can share a single treatment plan with up to 50 participants at once, with no limit on how many groups you can treat over time.
4. Higher client motivation: Software makes it easy for you to engage clients without the legwork, e.g., by scheduling homework to be delivered between sessions or by allowing you to give personal feedback using chat.
5. More accurate documentation: Note-taking is much easier and more organized with digital tools and templates. The right tools give you an easy way to create session notes, store them securely in each client’s profile, and retrieve them quickly from any connected device.

3 Best Tools For Practice Management and Billing

Your needs are somewhat unique as a mental health provider, so if you’re ready to scale up your practice, the best thing you can look for is software with specialized tools and functionalities that generic practice management solutions simply don’t have.

A few examples include:

• Activity design tools – for creating personalized mental health resources and sharing them with clients (e.g., therapy worksheets, exercises, and meditations)
• Pathway tools – for curating Activities into unique solutions (e.g., mental health treatment plans or group therapy packages), and
• Client engagement tools – these will help you build and maintain high client engagement (e.g., by sending reminders or instant messages).

If you’re looking to automate general practice management tasks such as billing and scheduling in addition to these functions, we’ve reviewed three top apps that you may choose to mix and match.

Software	Details
	Quenza is our top pick for an all-in-one mental health software solution, with HIPAA-compliant tools for real-time client interactions, group therapy, and even collaborating with other mental health professionals. The platform gives you everything you need to centralize, organize, and streamline a mental health practice of any size while sharing personalized therapy resources such as exercises, worksheets, and more with your clients between sessions. The following are just a few of Quenza’s features: Drag-and-drop Activity design tools Pathway tools for planning treatments and sharing resources Automatic client reminders, nudges, and prompts for incomplete homework White label features for sharing branded therapy solutions Live results tracking and PDF reports of client results Customizable digital templates for mental health notes and Activities
Name	Quenza
Price	$1+ monthly
Good For	Mental Health Coaching, Online Psychotherapy, Telepsychology, Telepsychiatry, Life Coaching, Online Coaching
More Info	Quenza

Software	Details
	Simple Practice is a user-friendly practice management software for psychotherapists which offers billing and scheduling functions plus additional admin features: Digital client intake forms Secure client communications Online payment processing Appointment scheduling and reminders Although it lacks the activity design functions and treatment planning tools of more robust mental health software options, Simple Practice is a convenient way to bill, schedule, accept payments, and centralize all your therapy documentation and intake needs on one platform.
Name	Simple Practice
Price	$39+ monthly
Good For	Scheduling, Billing, Practice Management, Invoices, Payments
More Info	Simple Practice

Software	Details
	Power Diary is an appointment management and billing software for mental health professionals; it integrates with Google Calendar, Stripe, and accounting software Xero. Invoices can be branded with your practice logo and designed to include details about your mental health services, e.g., session duration, date, and price. If you’re looking for a lightweight, relatively low-cost billing and scheduling app to use alongside your specialized therapy platform, Power Diary is free to trial for 14 days.
Name	Power Diary
Price	$5+ weekly
Good For	Video conferencing, Invoices, Payments, Analytics, Reports, Billing
More Info	Power Diary

Are EHR and EMR Features Necessary?

Every mental health provider wants to help more clients, but the reality of having a growing client list is that it can be hard to stay organized.

Electronic health records (EHRs), also known as electronic medical records (EMRs), are digital records of your patients’ medical histories, and can include data such as your clients’:

• Vital signs
• Past medical history
• Immunizations
• Lab data, and more.

EHRs are a potential solution to the logistical challenges of a growing client list, and a particularly effective way to stay organized if you work in a large organization such as a hospital.

A specialized mental health software platform like Quenza is an easy and organized way to store progress notes, psychotherapy notes, and crucial mental health data, but you may need an EHR if you’re after a more comprehensive clinical database.

Learn how to pick the best EHR software for mental health with our full guide to Electronic Health Records and How They Shape Today’s Medicine.

Best Software for Behavioral Health Specialists

So what’s the best software for you specifically, as a mental health professional?

Although there are countless tools to help you stay organized, Quenza is one of the few platforms that will help you become more effective as a provider.

If your goal is to help more clients by freeing up your time and focus, here are six of the many ways you can do exactly that using Quenza:

1. Create engaging, effective, and personalized therapy exercises with your own videos, MP3s, and images
2. Design online treatment plans from your own resources, as shown above, and drip-feed your interventions to clients on autopilot
3. Customize science-based therapy tools from pre-made templates, as shown below, rather than designing your own from scratch
4. Check-in with clients between sessions using HIPAA-compliant live chat
5. Improve your clients’ progress and results by sending automatic reminders and notifications between sessions, and
6. Save time by creating customizable templates for treatment plans that you use regularly.

3 Tools For Assessment and Treatment Planning

So you’ve found the right software for your practice, but where do you begin?

Start by customizing these three Quenza Expansion tools using your $1 trial, then share them with a client!

1. A Letter of Self-Compassion: As shown above, this is an ideal exercise for patients who struggle with anxiety or negative thoughts. This ready-to-customize template includes guidelines and prompts that will help them write a letter of kindness to themselves, which has been shown to help boost self-compassion.
2. Creative Visualization for Stress Reduction: This Quenza Expansion Activity introduces your client to a mental imaging technique that can help them manage anxiety and stress.
3. Moving from Cognitive Fusion to Defusion: This Expansion is great as part of an online CBT program. Use this as is or customize it with personal videos and text to teach clients how to defuse from problematic thoughts and emotions.

For more engaging therapy activities, take a look at our comprehensive resource: Therapy Activities: How To Easily Build & Send Online Exercises.

Final Thoughts

There’s no escaping from an increased workload as your mental health practice grows, but you don’t need to work exponentially harder.

A well-designed mental health software solution will help you to work smarter and more sustainably using automation, starting with the way you design exercises to how you engage clients. Get 30 days of unlimited access to Quenza’s tools for just $1 and see for yourself!