4 Must-Have Features of Occupational Therapy Software

If you’re looking for occupational therapy software, it’s likely that the way you’re currently managing your practice isn’t working for you: 

• Maybe you run a practice specializing in occupational therapy (OT) and you’re struggling to manage the complexities of documentation and billing alongside the rest of your business. 

• Or your practice offers OT alongside physical therapy (PT), speech therapy, and other treatment, and you’re looking for tools to handle their different demands. 

• Or perhaps your practice focuses on PT or another type of therapy and you bring in an occupational therapist on an occasional basis—but you need software that provides that flexibility. 

In all these cases, you’ll want a single software that helps you manage everything in your practice—one that makes clinical documentation effortless and compliant, and one that makes sure you get paid everything you’re owed. 

Many clinics we talk to are still using multiple tools to manage the different parts of their practice. They’ll piece together their electronic medical records (EMR) with a revenue cycle management (RCM) tool and a separate software for managing workflows or patient satisfaction. But this adds complexity to their day-to-day work (not to mention extra software costs), particularly when they’re handling multiple types of therapy.

Instead, choose an occupational therapy software that lets you handle all these functions and types of therapy under one roof. In this post, we show you how StrataEMR, our practice management tool for OTs and other therapists, does exactly that. 

We explore the four key features you need from your OT practice management software, and show you how StrataEMR can make your life much easier.

1. Occupational therapy documentation that’s flexible, effortless, and compliant

OT documentation is one of the biggest headaches for therapists. 

To comply with regulations, and to make sure you get paid for the treatment you provide, ensuring documentation is accurate and complete is an essential part of your day-to-day.

That’s why we built StrataEMR to make your documentation effortless and compliant—no matter what kind of therapy you offer. 

• All patient information is collected in one place—including their insurance and payment information, referral notes, evaluations, and medical history, and their plan of care. Your documentation is automatically populated from patient intake questionnaires to save you time. 

• Flexible templates to speed up treatment documentation. Generic EMR software and therapy software platforms often let occupational therapists down because they don’t offer templates that are OT-specific—for example, one that lets you document how you create a wrist cock-up splint.
  
  StrataEMR offers complete customization, letting you select different treatment protocols for plans of care to be auto-populated. And if you offer OT alongside other types of therapy, you can prepare templates for each individual patient.
  
  For example, below you’ll see an example of a template for OTs:

• Guardrails that ensure all documentation is clean, compliant, and gets you paid. When you’re using inadequate tools or an outsourced billing system, it can often happen that you issue a treatment only to later find out that it can’t be billed for.
  
  With StrataEMR, clinicians can see what can be billed while creating the documentation, to give you certainty that all treatment can be reimbursed. 

2. Billing services that get you paid

For many clinics, billing is treated as an afterthought. That’s because most software platforms don’t fully integrate billing with EMR. Typically, clinicians issue treatment, write up their documentation, and then deal with billing issues later on. 

Billing is separated from other tasks in their practice, and this costs them money. In fact, some OTs are only being reimbursed for 50% of insurance claims because their EMR doesn’t communicate with their billing system. 

To achieve the highest reimbursement rate possible, your EMR needs to integrate with billing. That’s why we’ve made billing central to everything StrataEMR does. Rather than staying up-to-date with CPT codes, L codes, and insurers’ ever-changing billing protocols, our OT software and dedicated RCM team will handle it all for you. It’ll save you time and boost your collections. In fact, we ensure clinics achieve reimbursement rates of higher than 99%.

Granted, that sounds unbelievable. Here’s how we achieve such high collections:

• Billing that’s built into your documentation system. StrataEMR’s Billing Plan of Care incorporates insurance protocols into the documentation you create for each patient. So, as a clinician completes their documentation for patient care, they’ll get an alert if they’re billing for something that won’t be reimbursed.
  
  (Similarly, if a patient is seeing both an OT and a PT in the same hour, your Billing Plan of Care for that patient will make sure that everything’s in order.)

• Up-to-date billing codes. You can simply trust that everything you submit goes through our extensive claims submission scrubbing process. This ensures all payer regulations, appendage of proper modifiers, and electronic routing is complete. 

• Billing services to chase up any denied claims. 24-hour claim turnaround. By putting billing compliance at the center of clinical documentation, StrataEMR ensures that 99% of electronic claims make it on file on the first attempt with no rejections. This happens within 24 hours of documentation completion. 
  
  Then, if any billing claims are denied, our billing team will chase them up relentlessly—no matter how small those claims are. This is one reason most of our clients reach a reimbursement rate of 99.999%.

• Clarity on your practice’s financial performance. You can see metrics including accounts receivable, average units per visit, and reimbursement averages per payer—to give you an up to date picture of how your occupational therapy practice is performing. 

Like many OT and PT practices we speak to, Samantha K’s practice has grown incredibly quickly—in the number of therapists, locations, and services they offer. But the business’s old billing software wasn’t able to keep up. 

“We knew we needed to make a change in billing administration due to our growth, but were hesitant because of all the facets of our practice and practitioners; we were fearful that a large delay would occur in the transition if it was not done perfectly,” she says.

“The decision to outsource our billing was a significant decision but has been seamless with StrataPT. From the first conversations with StrataPT, we were put to ease, and the efforts of StrataPT since that time have been above and beyond. The communication, customer service, and ease of using the system make the business side of running our practice efficient. We have no doubt that our revenues will increase by going with StrataPT and are now excited that we can turn to our key focus—our patients—without having to worry about our revenue cycle and insurance dilemmas.”

3. Practice management tools for smoother OT workflows

OT software shouldn’t just help with documentation and occupational therapy billing—it should help to streamline the day-to-day operations of your clinic, too. 

As an all-in-one practice management tool, StrataEMR gives you transparency over everything that’s going on in your clinic or practice group, including tasks, workflows, and any other processes. You keep everyone on the same page—no matter the size of your clinic.

• Live workflows to see your clinic in real-time. When you enter StrataEMR, the first thing you’ll see is the workflow dashboard. It shows you exactly what’s happening in your practice—patients who have checked in, therapy sessions in progress, and any tasks to be completed. 

• Automated task management. In the “Tasks” section, you’ll see the specific actions that need attention. Then, when a task is completed, the next task will be triggered and the relevant person in your clinic notified. 
  
  You can customize these workflows to suit your clinic’s specific needs. This way, tasks don’t fall through the cracks. 

• Credentialing for all therapists. Receive messages and alerts when clinicians’ verifications or credentials are about to expire—whether they’re OTs or speech therapists, in-house clinicians, or PRN therapists. 

• Patient scheduling. Our web-based scheduling software will make online bookings a breeze for your patients, while minimizing the amount of time spent on administrative tasks by your front desk staff. 

• Appointment reminders and intake questionnaires. Receive all the information you need from your patients before they arrive at your clinic. With StrataEMR, you can send all the documents they need to complete and sign—alongside SMS and email reminders—to reduce cancellations and missed appointments. 

• Support for telehealth and mobile therapists. If clinicians regularly visit patients at home, StrataEMR can make the process easier. Optimize your routes between visits, manage appointments and communicate with patients, and track your productivity—all from a single device. 

With StrataEMR, all of your critical data and processes can be handled from within the same system—to keep everyone on the same page and never miss an important task.

4. Data on your practice’s performance

Whether you’re an OT with a private practice or a larger group of clinics with multiple therapists or locations, you’ll want to stay up to date with how your business is performing.

With StrataEMR, you can access all the critical data you need on a single screen—whether that’s your billing data, appointment cancellations, or your patient satisfaction.

• Visibility on every transaction and payment with the Clarity Panel. See a comprehensive record of each visit, treatment, transaction, and payment in each patient account. 

• Marketing data to see where patients typically come from. Which referral source is bringing in most patients? How are your marketing campaigns performing? You can use this information to help grow your business further.