Owl Practice is a therapy software solution designed to help you start your practice, engage your clients, and grow your business as a solo provider or mental health team.
If you’re looking for a platform to help you run your practice, our Owl Practice reviews will help you decide if it’s right for you.
Features of The Owl Practice App
The Owl Practice app comes with a wide range of practice management tools that come in handy for both solo therapists and small-to-mid-size practices.
It offers HIPAA-compliant video conferencing, psychotherapy documentation tools, file sharing, and scheduling features, among others, and aims to be an all-in-one platform for medical and mental health professionals.
We’ve summarized the main features in the table below:
Feature | Yes/No | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Practice Management | ||
| Appointment Scheduling | ✓ | Allows many locations to be managed from one account. Syncs with Google Calendar and iCal. |
| Billing & Invoicing | ✓ | Generates invoices, account summaries, and receipts for emailing to clients. |
| Insurance Claims Management | ✓ | Create superbills and optional quarterly electronic remittance advice (ERAs). |
| Note-taking and Document Management | ✓ | Basic session note, assessment, and therapy progress note templates. HIPAA-compliant document storage. |
| Multiple Providers | ✓ | For practices with multiple locations, a single owl account can be used to manage many locations. |
| Practice Management Reports | ✓ | Dashboard includes customizable, exportable overviews of Year over Year Statistics, Practice Statistics, and Clinical Statistics. |
| Inventory Management | ╳ | |
| Mental Healthcare | ||
| Client Portal | ✓ | No portal for clients to log into on the free trial (optional extra), but contains a suite of tools for practitioners to manage clients, e.g., messaging, forms, and billing. |
| E-Prescriptions | ╳ | |
| EMR/EHR | ✓ | Client profiles can be used to track patient history, e.g., contact details, invoices, clinical details, circle of care details, and medication. |
| Custom Forms | ✓ | Includes customizable clinical measure templates to share with clients. |
Our Experience with the Owl Practice Client Portal and Practice Management Suite
Setting up the Owl Practice suite involves a few steps: creating therapists, creating clients, and creating services. We appreciated the handy popup that helped us get started, which could be helpful for first-time therapy software users.
We signed up as a small therapy practice with three providers and a few clients, with various services such as Couples Counseling, Individual Counseling, and Consultations.
Practice Management
Once we had a few services, clients, and practitioners, we found that we were able to do a lot within each client’s profile:
- Create sessions and notes
- Share documents
- Track finances
- Create invoices
- Record payments
- View a summary of our client’s account and sessions
- Export our CRM data and client messages
- Send forms and measures
- Create superbills for insurance management.
The HIPAA-compliant mental health platform can be used to create session notes from a blank document or three basic templates (Session Note, Assessment, and Therapy Progress Note).
Conveniently, they can be stored within a patient’s file or downloaded in PDF format for printing:
Another helpful feature of Owl Practice is that it automatically creates invoices once clients have attended a session, allowing you to email patients from the app and record payments without third-party software:
Appointments can be made directly from a client’s profile or from the calendar, and multiple providers can schedule sessions on one centralized calendar, as shown.
When creating a client profile, it’s possible to determine payment terms and set automatic SMS or email appointment reminders in advance.
One particularly useful tool is the software’s Workflow feature, which organizes all your administrative tasks into one area of the platform. Six sections give you an overview of different task types:
- Attendance: sessions that require attendance to be updated, i.e., if a client attended, canceled, or was a no-show.
- Invoice: sessions that require invoicing.
- Unpaid: new sessions for which payment has not been recorded.
- Unpaid >30: sessions older than thirty days for which payment has not been recorded.
- Notes: all sessions that still require signed notes.
- To-Do: all your To-Do’s for each client.
Using checkboxes and shortcuts, we found it an efficient way to accomplish a whole range of practice management tasks and keep track of key to-do items. We could invoice sessions, record payments, and sign notes in one area without navigating around the app, which was convenient.
Mental Health
Owl Practice has a few very useful mental health tools, such as a basic EHR function, HIPAA-compliant video conferencing, secure instant messaging, and templates for patient forms and behavioral health assessments.
One clear advantage of the app is that its Video Therapy feature supports multiple users and can be used from a range of devices, enabling practitioners to carry out couples or group sessions from anywhere.
Below is a screenshot of the Owl Practice client portal in which patients can book sessions, cancel appointments, view information on the practice and its services, and download invoices, receipts, and refund information:
Using the portal, therapists can send therapy and counseling forms, messages, or measures using templates, as shown below. Only Solo users have full access to manage and personalize mental health assessments for clients. For Group practices this function is only available to practice owners and office admins.
Overall, it took us several hours to set up Owl Practice with all our clients, therapists, sessions, and portal information, and trying out different features wasn’t as simple as it could have been.
We referred numerous times to the platform’s support documents and weren’t overly impressed with the client portal, which can only be accessed online and was cumbersome for us to set up as a client.
Another shortcoming, in our eyes, was the rather limited form creation tool for practitioners. While good for creating and saving basic documents as templates, we would have appreciated more capabilities, such as an activity builder or multimedia uploads for creating worksheets and client resources.
Another potential improvement would be the availability of smartphone apps for clients, who could then complete forms and measures without relying on a web browser.
Pricing & Target Audience
Owl Practice is designed for mental health professionals and comes with plans for solo and group practices.
Scheduling, billing, and client reminders are available on all plans, and the platform can be tested with a 14-day free trial account.
There are three solo practice pricing options:
- Owl Starter: $25/month, 20 Client Sessions, Calendars & Reminders, Client Records & Notes, Billing & Payment Integration, Dashboard & Reporting
- Owl Core: $39/month, including Video Therapy, Online Appointment Booking, a Customizable Homepage (client portal), Billing and Payment Integrations, Client Intake & Consent Form templates
- Owl Pro: $49/month, including features such as Integrated Insurance & Claims, Collaborative Video Sessions, Secure Messaging, Clinical Measures, and Medications Tracking
5 Customer Reviews
What do other mental health providers think about Owl Practice?
Like us, some users found it a useful toolkit for practice management, especially the Workflow feature:
“I LOVE the Workflow section!!! It has rescued me from billing oversights that could have easily slipped by without detection when I’ve been extremely busy.” — Capterra
The platform’s billing and client portal features received good reviews:
“I love all of the features and the ease of invoicing and sending receipts. My clients like the ability to use the portal and to book their own appointments. I also like the ability to be able to send measures to clients.” — Capterra
Others felt that it was cumbersome to learn and use, as we ourselves experienced:
“It isn’t always intuitive to find the functions I want, or make changes to existing sessions. There is a strong “tree” organization to the major sections, without pathways to access different sections without “traveling back along each branch toward the trunk” so that you can “travel along another branch.” I hope that metaphor makes sense!” — GetApp
A few users reported experiencing glitches and hangups while using the software’s Video Therapy feature:
“…the system often freezes or loses connection with certain users during sessions. I frequently have to pivot to phone session when tech issues happen, as the time it takes to rectify them interest with the hour time limit to sessions.” — Capterra
Several users felt the software was pricey, and the Owl Practice support team received mixed reviews:
“The WORST part is that you have to email customer service – no phone number and the response time (if you get a response) greatly varies from one day to several. Did I mention that sometimes they don’t respond at all.” — GetApp
Owl Practice vs Jane App vs Quenza
Here’s a closer look at how the Owl Practice app compares with two of its main competitors: Jane and Quenza.
| Owl Practice | Jane App | Quenza | |
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Interfaces |
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Customer Service |
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Pricing | $25+/month | CAD 79+/month | $49+/month |
Integrations |
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20 Advantages and Disadvantages
Still not sure whether Owl Practice is the right software for you?
We’ve summarized the platform’s pros and cons in the table below:
Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|
Practice Management | |
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Mental Healthcare | |
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| User Experience | |
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Conclusion
All in all, we liked the wealth of practice management features that Owl Practice has to offer. Billing, scheduling, and even managing daily tasks was relatively simple once we had the software set up, and the library of mental health measures was extremely convenient.
Getting started took a very long time in comparison to other apps that we have tested, however. The platform required a lot of navigating back and forth between various sections as we created services, configured our portal, and managed therapists, which could be somewhat confusing for many new users.
We would have liked to see more in the way of form or resource-creation tools for practitioners, and the client portal was rather painstaking to set up with no clear invitations for our clients with regard to registering or even where to go.
The software could be greatly improved with smartphone apps, but in our eyes, has some good potential as a client management app or for providers who are looking to simplify their billing, and calendar management.
Final Thoughts
Want to see how Owl Practice compares with other HIPAA-compliant platforms? If you’re looking for an easy way to assess clients and keep them engaged with branded, personalized mental health solutions of your own, you need user-friendly tools, templates, and program design features that are created especially for therapists.
Start your 30-day Quenza trial for $1 and see for yourself!
