Therapy Notes Review: A Look At Its Features

Telehealth is one of the quickest, easiest ways to help others when face-to-face therapy isn’t viable. Its cost advantages and convenience offer a popular treatment option for patients and mental healthcare practitioners alike, but when it comes to logistics, it can be hard to get started.

TherapyNotes is one potential way for e-counselors, telepsychiatrists, and mental health coaches to deliver engaging, effective sessions online. With native telehealth video sessions, practice management capacities, and other telehealth functions, it promises to be a one-stop-shop for blended care practices.

But does it live up to its promise? In this article, we test-drive TherapyNotes to compare it against its main competitors. Read on to discover its features, advantages, and how you can integrate it into your virtual care portfolio.

Before you dive in, why not try out Quenza with our $1 trial? Quenza’s user-friendly e-therapy tools will help you build engagement and craft unique, patient-centered solutions, giving you everything you need to deliver professional online therapy under your own practice brand.

Features of Therapy Notes

Use the table below for a little more insight into TherapyNotes’ full range of features.

15 Advantages and Disadvantages

In this table, we’ve highlighted a few strengths and weaknesses of TherapyNotes as a practice management and mental healthcare solution.

Target Audience and Pricing

Distinctly a telehealth solution, TherapyNotes is designed to be an all-in-one practice management software and mental health system for solo, small, medium, and large providers.

Because it allows for HIPAA-compliant communications, it’s ideal for telemedicine practitioners such as telepsychiatrists, MDs, and e-clinics. It doesn’t support e-prescriptions, unlike some other care management systems, which is worth bearing in mind.

Therapy Notes Pricing

Different TherapyNotes plans are available for Private Practices, Non-Profits, and Education Providers. Non-profit organizations begin with a $25/month plan.

If you’re hoping to use TherapyNotes as private practice software, its available tiers are:

• Solo practitioner $49/month
• Group plan $59/month for the first user, and between $20-$30 for additional non-clinical staff.
• Enterprise plan $59/month for larger healthcare organizations, and between $20-$30 for additional non-clinical staff.

TherapyNotes does not limit the number of users for its Group or Enterprise packages.

Therapy Notes vs Its Competitors (Chart)

We compared TherapyNotes with Simple Practice and Quenza in terms of cost, functionality, and the different user support options to help you with your software search.

As the table reveals, each has unique strengths and weaknesses – TherapyNotes costs less than the other two on a monthly basis, however it lacks the convenience of a smartphone app.

	TherapyNotes	SimplePractice	Quenza
Interfaces	Web	Web Android iPhone	Web Android iPhone
Customer Service	Phone Tutorials Articles Mobile app Live customer service	Phone Tutorials Articles Mobile app Live customer service	Tutorials Community Forum Articles Mobile app Online customer service
Pricing	$25/month	$39/month	$49/month
Integrations	Google Calendar Outlook	Google Calendar Outlook Stripe

Case Study Example

We tested TherapyNotes with a psychologist profile, signing up for a team plan that supports multiple providers.

Our first impression of the software was that it was easy on the eye, uncluttered with all the main functions listed in a dashboard menu at the top:

• To-Do: A quick list of outstanding tasks for attention. During our test drive, this was full of information about how to set up and where to find more information.
• Scheduling
• Patients: Where we could manually enter new patients. However, we quickly discovered that importing from a spreadsheet involved uploading a file to TherapyNotes and waiting for them to import client information directly into our account, which would take 1-3 business days
• Staff: For adding all providers and assigning permissions
• Billing: Including batch statements, practice management reports, and custom reports
• Payers: E.g. Insurance providers, drug suppliers, and more
• Library: Where we could upload and customize different forms using templates (e.g. patient contacts, patient information) or from scratch, before sharing them with other providers or patients.

Practice Management

The first feature we tested was TherapyNotes’ appointment scheduling capability. Here, we could save time when scheduling sessions by entering a new patient’s name, DOB, and contact information. Later, the profile could be populated in the Patient Tab.

TherapyNotes has advanced electronic health record (EHR) capabilities, so its patient information section is robust. Here, it’s possible to carry out a range of functions in a few clicks:

• View and edit patient info
• Create and access your To-Do list of custom and automated patient-related reminders
• See a patient’s schedule, e.g. upcoming tasks
• Upload and view documents
• Browse their billing history and edit your own billing settings, e.g. enter insurance information, and
• View which clinicians they are working with.

We could also produce statements directly from each patient’s chart, a handy way to provide receipts for e-therapy and other services.

On the billing page, we could enter patient payment information and history, charges, credit, as well as search all billing transactions by clinician.

Within the same function, we were able to search insurance claims information, view eligibility history by patient, and produce numerous other useful reports, such as revenue, write-off, note count, and pre-authorization reports, from one centralized location.

We could easily see this feature being used to improve efficiency in e-clinics and private practices, and it was easily understood for a quick learning curve. For practice administrators and billing clinicians, it’s worth noting that TherapyNotes provides its own EDI for electronically exchanging medical claims.

Mental Healthcare

Next, we looked at the two key telehealth solutions TherapyNotes’ offers: its Client Portal and Telehealth Session functionality.

Enabling the client portal was easy; straight away we were able to control accessibility settings and invite clients to request appointments.

We also sent our sample patient a Patient Contact form using TherapyNotes’ template, to save in-clinic time or start e-therapy right away.

Finally, we enabled Telehealth Sessions to test the HIPAA-compliant e-counseling feature and carry out a video therapy appointment. While TherapyNotes’ doesn’t currently offer Group Therapy or screen-sharing functions, any client with portal access and a scheduled session can be invited to join a session with a few clicks from their calendar.

Throughout our test drive, we relied heavily on TherapyNotes’ useful database of blog articles. While the interface itself is relatively intuitive, we found this a great way to speed up our learning process so we could get started immediately.

A Look At The App

At present, TherapyNotes doesn’t offer an iPhone or Android app for its mobile users. In our eyes, it’s one of the platform’s main drawbacks compared to its key rivals.

All of its functions, from scheduling and payment processing, are browser-based – however, a bookmark can be created on your smartphone or device’s desktop for quicker access.

5 Customer Reviews

We looked at users’ experiences on TherapyNotes’ practice management and mental healthcare features to see how our experience compared.

Regarding practice management, TherapyNotes users seem divided on its billing function. Some described it as ‘seamless,’ and others as highly efficient, while others had a few problems:

“Changing billing if there are errors can be a bit of a struggle and as far as I know, there’s no way to order procedure codes in the dropdown for scheduling. These are very minor things of course.” – Capterra

Its mental healthcare templates were an advantage for behavioral health specialists:

“Important for scheduling and notes after sessions. Also helpful for tracking. Great for behavioral health management. Has templates that are helpful. Billing software is helpful.” – G2.com

The wealth of available industry information in the TherapyNotes blog was well-received, but supportive customer service staff were by far the software’s biggest advantage:

“TherapyNotes Customer Service is stellar; the replies, even to complex requests or questions, are immediate (typically within two hours) and informative with step-by-step, helpful answers. I’d highly recommend the platform to any health care clinician wanting to automate and better manage their practice.” – Capterra

“…their customer service is excellent. No matter who I speak to or what issues I have, I am treated as if I am the only one that matters in that moment. They helped me learn this program and continue to educate me on multiple aspects of the program that I now need to utilize.” – TrustPilot

With overall value-for-money in mind, most practitioners using TherapyNotes were satisfied:

“I have easily gained more in value than the monthly expense, and it is with a great ease of mind that I use them to support myself and my clients. Thanks for all your hard work.” – Capterra

Conclusion

Our test drive was enough to demonstrate the value of TherapyNotes as a practice management tool. With all the standard functions of its main competitors, such as appointment scheduling, reporting, billing, and EHR, it does offer the capacity to save busy practitioners plenty of admin time.

The client portal itself was rather simplistic, as it didn’t allow our patients to pay online, and the software itself falls short of offering any marketing functions.

On the whole, however, once we had populated our EHR, payer, clinician, and patient databases, it was incredibly quick and simple to create invoices, book appointments, and send batch invoices. As the software is paid for on a per-user basis, we can easily see it being good value for money.

Final Thoughts

One thing we noticed while testing TherapyNotes was that despite its ease of use, the whole test drive took somewhat longer than other telehealth solutions we’ve reviewed. This was primarily due to the lack of a patient import feature, which meant we had to manually input our patient and practitioner information to get started and try its features.

If you’re not currently using private practice software or a practice management solution for your blended care practice, TherapyNotes’ offers a great HIPAA-compliant e-therapy interface that’s vastly easy to use. Coupled with its many practice management features, it’s worth testing it out yourself.

We hope you enjoyed this review. To design and deliver your unique therapy solutions online, don’t forget to sign up for Quenza’s therapist software on our $1 plan.

Quenza will give you all the e-mental health tools you need to offer personalized, digital interventions and treatments professionally, so you can better enhance the wellbeing of your clients and make a positive impact.