Office Ally in Vancouver, Washington offers their suite of interactive asp internet based solutions allowing for patient care from the point of contact in the physician's office to receiving payment from the insurance companies and providing overall care management from the IPAs and Health Plans. For $29.95 per month/provider, Office Ally offers EHR 24/7, an Electronic Health Records Program designed to allow healthcare providers to spend more time with patients and less time on paperwork.
$39.95
per month
WellSky Personal Care
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
WellSky Personal Care (formerly ClearCare) is an online home healthcare business administration platform. It includes features for scheduling in-home care visits, messaging between patients and caregivers, and marketing caregiving services.
Smaller doctor or dental offices would be fine using Office Ally for patient visits and appointments; it's easy to use and learn, and I'm able to handle most needs with it. For a larger practice, there are better, more technologically advanced software products that would offer more streamlined and professional statements, schedules, and accounting needs.
ClearCare/WellSky is not a software I would go out of my way to endorse. The coding bugs are numerous and fixing those bugs is not at all a priority. Unfortunately, it is still the most robust platform of it's kind - reporting, customization, integrations, automation capabilities, mobile app for caregivers - and with it becoming part of WellSky I am hopeful they will now have the resources to allocate for bug squishing
Managing the scheduling process form the employee and client standpoint. In one screen we can see exactly what is going on with a client. Who's there, when they arrived, when they will be leaving, etc. Plus we can manage up to the minute changes in the care plan, in real time.
Payment processing allows us to bill and initiate client payments with a few clicks. It automatically reconciles accounts receivable. It handles both credit card and ACH payments. Saves a bunch of time.
Background checks are fast and easy because they are integrated into the platform. When a potential employee applies it starts the system begins all the steps in the hiring process. Once they get to orientation and have completed all of the other hiring process steps, with one click we initiate a customized background check that meets our licensing requirements.
There needs to be a way to print patient visit summaries for a date range vs printing one summary for each appointment, one at a time.
It would be helpful if the top row of the calendar, showing doctors/practitioners names, would remain on the screen when scrolling to the end of the day. Appointments get scheduled under the wrong doctor at times because the names disappear and columns get confused.
There should be a way to view/print/download what has been paid, per patient, to the office in one place vs searching for payments under the Accounting Tab and payments tracked under Patient visits.
ClearCare does experience times when the system glitches. You cannot add or edit shifts, see client or caregiver details, nothing. They don't have anything in place that reassures you that they are aware of the problem and are working to fix it. It doesn't usually happen more than a few times a year, but we rely so heavily on this software for the daily operation of our business that even 15 minutes down can prove to be catastrophic.
You can call tech support, but overall I have found them rather unhelpful. I don't usually stay on hold long enough to get a live person, preferring to send an email if it's not an urgent need. I have been disappointed with the time it takes to resolve issues; the longest I went without a fix was about 8 months. They are pretty slow to change when it's something that has been suggested by the network publically. Moreover, sometimes the changes they implement make things more difficult for us or require features or functionality that we would prefer not to use. For example, they are rolling out a new feature that will allow the caregivers to enter their own availability in the system. We require them to contact the office to change their availability or request time off and plan to do everything we can to keep it that way.
The mobile version of the administrative site is essentially the desktop version, but tiny. When we are out and about after hours, inevitably we use our cell phones to utilize the software. Any shift adjustments are tedious, as the pop-up box moves around whenever you edit a field. To be fair, I'm not sure that the time and energy it would take to redesign the mobile site would be worth it when we still get all the functionality of the full site, even if it is harder to maneuver.
I have used ClearCare for about a year now and have only experienced positive outcomes with the system. It has everything you need from simple note reminders to detailed medial information regarding your client. If anyone in the health field takes the time to view this software, they would be hooked.
I haven't had to call too many times to get help with Office Ally but when I have had to call, I haven't always had the best customer service. It seems that I am bugging the person I reach when I call for technical support because I'm usually reminded that there are videos to watch for technical support help. On the flip side, there have been times that I called for help and was treated how you assume you'll be treated when you call for help - with grace, dignity, professionalism, and respect.
They are reasonably responsive with simple questions, but when it comes to the software not functioning as expected, resolution is very slow. I had a situation where I would click "cancel" in a scheduling window and it would go ahead and make the change (i.e. I didn't realize a caregiver wasn't actually available or that it would create over time, so I would cancel out of that window to go reevaluate, but when it closed that window, the change would be made regardless). That took 8 months for them to resolve, during which time they released a number of relatively useless updates. Currently, I am waiting for them to fix Safe Mode, which is supposed to give us basic access to personnel and scheduling. A select few clients/caregivers actually show up in this system, rendering it largely useless. I have been waiting since late August without an update or resolution, it is currently mid-February. For software that touts safe mode, I would think they would make sure it's actually functional for all users. They have to advertise it in the network because the software goes down with some frequency, at least every few months.
I used to use Best Notes. Best Notes was difficult to navigate and very inflexible. We used it in the early time of EHR/EMR, so that the software was not very useful. When I changed to Office Ally, we are so delighted to change it because again it is easily to navigate the software. There is minimum of learning curve than other software.
This is a similar system that was created for organizational purposes for health businesses. Ortho2 is not as user friendly and takes much longer to learn the different ins and outs of the software system. I used it for over six years and still did not use all of the features in the system
POSITIVE IMPACT: We can access almost any metric related to the business and build reports that allow us to set goals, identify potential issues, maintain oversight, and automate workflows with the report scheduling
NEGATIVE IMPACT: We've been dealing with the same software bugs for over 5 years now, they slow productivity, create room for user error, require workarounds to be created, you name it, just a lot of work to make the platform's shortcomings better since they refuse to do it for us
