CentralReach Review: Innovative Practice Management & EHR Technology

CentralReach Cost

Like, many enterprise SaaS companies, CentralReach charges an implementation fee, and an ongoing subscription fee. There are additional fees for:

Table of Contents

• Full Review
• CentralReach Cost
• Key Features
  • Appointments & Scheduling
  • Client/Parent Portal
  • Clinical Documentation
  • Billing & Invoicing
  • Precision Teaching
  • Human Resources
• Is CentralReach right for you?

Full Review: CentralReach Practice Management Software for Behavioral Health

Launched in 2012, CentralReach is a leading EHR and practice management solution for clinicians and educators focused on applied behavioral analysis, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and PK-12 special education. The company was founded by Charlotte Fudge, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, after she experienced the challenges of managing an ABA clinic first-hand. Over 65,000 therapists and administrators actively use the system each year. The company has 150 employees, is hiring for over 20 new positions, and is headquartered in Pompano Beach, Florida.

CentralReach offers a full set of integrated solutions with rich functionality ideal for any established behavioral health practice looking for a comprehensive solution. The same dataset is used to power its practice management, clinical, BI, revenue cycle management and HR solutions, which results in time savings and operational consistency. The system is built specifically for the behavioral health market. Therefore, it comes with value-add features like Chartlytics and the CR Institute. Chartlytics, which CentralReach acquired in 2018, is a real-time behavior change tool that supports your therapists in making well-informed, effective decisions on a daily basis to help more learners realize their potential. Additionally, the CR Institute offers a marketplace of expert-created courses to aid in the professional development of your team.

Overall, customers of CentralReach are very happy with the system. There are some minor missing features, for example you cannot create an alert for expiring employee documents, and the tool is not fully mobile-friendly. However, we believe the multitude of positives well outweigh these pain points. If you are interested in trying CentralReach, you can book a demo here.

Key Features

Below, we'll discuss some of the key features of CentralReach, and how they benefit your mental health practice. We'll also show a few images of the system to give you an idea of its design and architecture.

Appointments & Scheduling

To schedule appointments, customers typically leverage CentralReach's Find a Provider tool. This tool allows your team to search for a clinician using many criteria including zip code, distance from client, language, credential, and availability to match each client with the ideal clinician. Appointments come with a flexible tagging feature, which allows you to create labels of your choice to categorize each appointment. The data from each appointment flows into the clinical and billing components of CentralReach's system.

There are multiple ways to view your calendar inside of CentralReach. You are able to view your calendar by day, week or month. It is simple to pull in appointments for specific clients or RBTs. A useful planner view allows you to see appointments aggregated by RBT or client. Here is an example of this view provided courtesy of CentralReach.

Client/Parent Portal

CentralReach offers a secure online gateway to connect with your clients. The portal has broad functionality.

Billing: Clients can view all paid and unpaid invoices. They are able to download and pay invoices and submit credit card information. Clients are also able to electronically sign timesheets.

Documentation: Parents or clients can use the portal to access all of their documents. This includes photos, videos, insurance authorizations, medical reports, notes and forms. They can also share documents with additional members of your team through the portal.

Appointments & Schedules: Parents or clients can access their scheduled appointments in CentralReach's portal. While they can access these appointments, they cannot create or schedule new appointments.

HIPAA-compliant messaging: Your clients can securely message your team through CentralReach's HIPAA-compliant portal. A helpful feature is that you are able to assign which members from your team are able to communicate with each client.

Here is an example of CentralReach's Client/Parent Portal courtesy of the company:

Clinical Documentation

CentralReach offers digital program books, as well as customizable electronic program sheets and notes. The program books allow you to select goals from a pre-populated library and track results in real time. With the customizable notes, you can create plans, progress reports, intervention plans, assessments, and end-of-session forms. These are customizable to meet the needs of your payors and are integrated with all of the other data in CentralReach's system, including client and clinical data. Data from notes also integrates with CentralReach's billing system, which creates efficiencies for your payroll and claims workflows.

Billing and Invoicing

CentralReach's billing system was designed specifically for ABA professionals with the goal of minimizing the amount of time required to process claims. Billing codes are matched with each appointment, allowing the payroll and claims process to begin as soon as the appointment does. The tool's Claims Manager uses the data from the appointment to create and submit your claim.

CentralReach also offers a new billing service called BillMax that is available exclusively for CentralReach customers. The professionals at Billmax are revenue cycle management experts and can help you improve clean claim rates and increase your revenue. They help streamline your workflow end-to-end, from claims submission to receivables collections. They are also available for ongoing consultation on billing best practices and live training workshops for your team.

Precision Teaching

In 2018, CentralReach acquired Chartlytics, a real-time behavior change tool that allows your therapists to measure behavior, record it visually, and make better decisions. When implemented properly, this tool can empower your team to quantify learner progress, teach more efficiently, and more consistently help learners realize their potential. Customers often praise CentralReach's performance in terms of collecting, analyzing and visualizing data.

CentralReach also offers CR Institute, which has a high volume of free and for-purchase courses to help your behavior analysts succeed with Precision Teaching. Example expert-created courses include:

Here's a look at the content available in the CR Institute:

Human Resources

CentralReach offers solutions to assist you with employee onboarding, credentialing, and payroll. Its document management solution allows you to gather all the necessary documents from new employees, including tax, personal verification documents and executed company agreements. The tool also offers a report to make it easy to identify employees with any outstanding documents. The payroll solution uses data in your calendar to calculate each employee's hours and wages. Further, CentralReach makes it easy to integrate this data with the payroll processor of your choice.

Is CentralReach right for you?

CentralReach is an outstanding, full solution for specifically for behavioral health. Its integrated practice management, clinical, BI, revenue cycle management and HR solutions make it a must-try for any established behavioral health organization that is looking for a comprehensive solution. The recent acquisition of Chartlytics and the CR Institute are added benefits for those interested in Precision Teaching. It is important to keep in mind that, due to the fullness of the solution and its target customer size, CentralReach is more expensive than basic alternatives. If you are interested in trying CentralReach, you can book a demo here.