A manager purchased Therapist Assistant about a year ago and recently left the organization. The scheduling component is up and running pretty well, except for a rather awkward or slow method of generating appointment calling/confirmation lists. Also the staff would like the report to flag first-time customers.

However, the other features are not yet being used nor do staff really understand what the software is capable of. From my visit to the website and downloading of the demo version - Therapist Helper is a complete - and mostly - a billing and scheduling system. It can be single user or multiple user with different protections and access assigned. There is an export button on every screen that allows export to excel. The documentation is kind of sparse and I'm not sure at this point whether the version on the web is more complete or whether that's the version the office possesses was printed off the web. As stated above, scheduling is up and running, however, the information that allows the system to generate bills etc. for each patient is not being input, therefore, there's no output.

Staff would like to get the billing portion of Therapist Helper up and running, if feasible. Staff would like to know if/how the software handles sliding fee scales (and group fees?) and whether it can accommodate the various sources of payment available to them - various grants, medicare, patient insurance, and patient portion. They would like to know how the software handles insurance deductibles and would like a screen that shows them clearly the patient balance owed as well as the total amount owed. They would like to export billing data to excel so that they can create the bills on various agencie's forms - assuming the software doesn't adequately allow them to create different billing forms.

A majority of business takes place at another site which uses different software for scheduling which is also apparently capable of billing, however not used because of certain inaccuracies detected with the software. This paperwork from this site is forwarded to Agency to enter and bill along with Agency's charges.

The biggest bill goes to DFC monthly and can be over 100 pages in length.

Proposal:

We should approach this as if we were evaluating Therapist Helper - at least the billing portion (even though we really already have purchased it and plan to use it - that fact gives us a unique opportunity to experiment hands on and not take some sales rep's word for how well it will work for us). We probably may need to contact the company during this period to see if we can use their demo download on a local machine so that we don't have to experiment with a live system - and to see how well their customer support works. The phase of the project will include two tasks:

1. Identifying each step of the cycle from patient intake to final billing, receipt of payments and other accounting tasks. (I would estimate that this would take 2 to 4 hours and would require input from Agency staff).

2. Creating and designing a group of cases/patients and tracking them through the system - including what data needs to be captured at each step of the cycle talked about in 1. and who will be capturing or entering the data. (I would recommend the cases cover the most representative and greatest bulk or volume of scenarios you would encounter - we can worry about the extremes or oddities later).

    a.    Creating the cases should probably take 2 to 5 hours and will require input from Agency staff.

    b.    Tracking the cases would probably take 1 to three days and will require involvement of key Agency staff.

After we have completed this process we should have gained quite a bit of knowledge and can decide where we need to go from there.

The issues of implementing different levels of access and security should be treated as a separate problem and approached at a later date? The networked version of this software does have that capability.

Also the issue of the separate site using different software should be treated as a separate problem which we may want to take a look at - whether we want to run their data through therapist helper's billing features - or enter it directly into an excel spreadsheet - or better yet, get an electronic version that could be imported into whatever we want from the remote site - that is if they have already entered most of the data.

Finally the issue of training and designing some job aids for people using the system may be something you want to look at - in addition to the help, training, and documentation offered by the vendor - again this is something that we can do at a later date.

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Notes to myself used to generate the propsal:

Things I have learned so far from our visit, Therapist Helper's website, and downloading their demo version to my machine at home:

1. There's an export to excel buttom on almost every page.

2. The libraries are pre-defined - you cannot create new ones or add your own.

3. The software comes preloaded with cpt code and diagnosis code databases.

4. The software is primarily intended to handle accounting and billing as well as scheduling.

5. The software does allow levels of access and software protection.

6. The vendor offers other products that go along with Therapist Helper.