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2024’s Best Practice Management Tools for ABA Providers

Practice Management Options

The field of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is rapidly evolving. A few years ago, Accupoint, NPAWorks, CentralReach, Rethink and a few others were battling it out for market share and either prevailed by delivering a solution ABA providers needed and paid for or were acquired.  Now a new cohort of practice management solutions have propped up. At Teamwork, we’ve been demoing practice management tools for years. We’ve demo-ed most of them, if not all. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll aim to shortlist the best ABA practice management tools, answering the question: What are the best ABA practice management tools to demo in 2024? You’ll see that we purposefully didn’t select one because we fundamentally believe one size doesn’t fit all.

Table of Contents

  1. Understanding the Core Functionality
  2. Market Leaders
  3. New Entrants Gaining Traction
  4. All Other PMS Options 
  5. Key Considerations
  6. Conclusion

Understanding the Core PMS Needs of ABA Providers

Before diving into the tools, it’s essential to grasp the “core” practice management needs of ABA providers. These include:

  • Intake/CRM: 
    • Client: Staging, HIPAA-compliant intake forms, documentation
    • Therapist: Hiring process, training, credentialing, etc.
  • Fee Schedules + Authorizations: Managing client authorizations and ensuring proper payment
  • Staffing: Who’s appropriate for who, maximizing hours, visualizing gaps, geographic considerations 
  • Scheduling: Creating appointments, recording cancellations, providing reminders, non-billable time.
  • Billing: 
    • Claims generation from session details
    • Session note documentation editing and storage
    • Integration with a clearinghouse
    • Patient invoice generation
    • Reconciling all payments and payor/funder notifications back to each session
  • Communication: Allowing a HIPAA-compliant way to communicate with therapists and admin
  • Payroll Calculation: Understanding how much to pay therapists per pay period
  • Reporting: Visualizing financial, operational, and accounting metrics
  • Integrations: Do they have established integrations with data collection, CRMs, ATS, HRIS/payroll, or scheduling? Did they build their own solution which satisfies their customers needs? Do they have open API to make it simple to build partnerships?
  • Access: Can you download your own data easily?

Largest ABA Practice Management Platforms (in alphabetical order)

Aloha:

  • Features: Intake, Fee schedule, Auths, Appointment Generation, Billing, Payroll functionality
  • Pros: Likely the best customer service in the industry and close to 500 customers and a lot of the core, necessary features. Affordable with a provider-friendly contract structure.
  • Cons: No direct patient invoicing functionality yet (maybe 2024?)
  • Notable Integrations: Hi Rasmus, Motivity, OfficeAlly, Availity. Selective but open to integrations

CentralReach:

  • Features: Intake, Fee schedules, Auths, Scheduling, Billing, Communication, Reporting, Payroll functionality
  • Pros: There’s a reason CR has the largest market share in behavioral health and it’s because they do many things really well or well enough that you can move on to more pressing concerns. They are the most broadly featured solution
  • Cons: Add-on pricing model makes it the most expensive compared to other ABA practice management solutions
  • Notable Integrations: Only relevant ones are clearinghouses (Change, OfficeAlly, and Waystar) and payment processors
  • Disclosure: We’re a CR Customer

Other Impressive PMS Platforms (in alphabetical order)

 Chorus:

  • Features: Intake, CRM, Fee schedule, Auths, Appointment Generation, Billing, Reporting, Payroll functionality
  • Pros: Built on Microsoft Cloud so Chorus has a great CRM foundation, which allows for more than just intake form creation. Also built by another ABA organization so you know they’re empathetic to the problems that service providers face. They have a very impressive data collection tool that is directly integrated with their practice management tool
  • Cons: They don’t offer managed RCM yet, but the platform includes strong analytics and automation
  • Integrations: Releasing a full partner ecosystem in 2024 (not just integrating just other data collection tools or RCM, but also adding rate consultants, business advisors, etc.)!

Lumary:

  • Features: Intake, CRM, Fee schedule, Auths, Scheduling, Billing, Reporting and Payroll functionality as well
  • Pros: Built on Salesforce so Lumary has a strong CRM foundation as well. One of the few platforms that is as feature rich as CentralReach is on the practice management side, if not more feature rich. Lots of willingness to integrate with other best in class technology platforms
  • Cons: They charge implementation fees
  • Notable Integrations: Hi Rasmus, Spectrum Ai, Motivity, and Juniper

TherapyPMS:

  • Features: Intake, CRM, Fee schedule, auths, Appointment Generation, Billing, Reporting, Payroll functionality
  • Pros: Feels to us like the best bang for your buck. Adaptable to Multi-Discipline Therapy practices. Most affordable and really strong set of features as well! Already integrates with payroll/HRIS platforms too!
  • Cons: Not enabled with Mobile App – Android
  • Integrations: Open APIs and already integrated with Motivity, Hi-Rasmus, Paycom, Quickbooks, EVV, Waystat & Ability

All The Other Names We Know. Feel Free to Diligence.

The Full List of Remaining PMS We Know That Have ABA Customers

There’s a chance we demo-ed them or were customers a while ago and they’re really good now or they’ve ghosted our demo request. We also may not have gotten approval on our positive feedback on them. There’s also a few we just haven’t spoken to yet as they’re so new or soon to be released so we thought we’d at least provide the exhaustive list as we know of!

Key Considerations When Choosing a Practice Management Tool

  • Integrations: The best platforms should set themselves up to seamlessly integrate with your favorite/existing tools.
  • User Experience: These days, if it’s not pretty and simple, therapists and administrators will complain and won’t adopt it.
  • Scalability: Ensure the tool grows with your practice. Every mistake a platform has becomes more and more annoying if it repeatedly fails your company.
  • Customization and Configuration: Allowing a company to have flexibility in its workflows can make adoption a lot easier.
  • Data Security: HIPAA-compliance is a must have
  • Uptime: Losing data that doesn’t save is such a large of a headache for all therapists and admin

Conclusion: Embrace Technology or Lose the Competitive Edge

Practice management solutions are not yet a commodity. Each of these platforms are uniquely good in their own way and there is a right or “good enough” solution for each size of ABA organization. We encourage you to do your research and make sure you do a fresh demo even if you’ve seen their platform a few months or years ago. Lots of these companies are constantly improving! Additionally, if you’re still feeling like you need complementary staffing and scheduling automation functionality, feel free to book a demo with Teamwork. We’re open to integrating with all of them! If you’re interested in learning what staffing and scheduling solutions are available for ABA providers, we’d love for you to reach out by scheduling a demo!

Interested in Teamwork? Schedule a Demo!

At Teamwork, we pride ourselves on being different from our competition. Teamwork is built specifically for ABA providers with a focus on clinical quality. We automate manual work associated with matching, staffing and scheduling so your team can focus on what’s important: delivering quality care to your patients.

Interested? Fill out the form below to sign-up for a demo of our tool!

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