• OrchestraOne touts a flat $20/month cost but (literally) hides huge extra costs on their pricing page that makes it 10x – 20x more expensive even for modest practices. Their “3% for payment processing and $5 per insurance claim submission” is not unreasonable, but it IS (literally) hidden on their Pricing page in a way that I consider outright misleading. see for yourself I assumed it was an oversight, but a month later they still hide that pricing on their pricing page.

• No self-pay under client control. Hard to believe, but they don’t support clients managing their own credit card info.

  • In order for a client to make a copayment via credit card, the client must give you their card info to store, then you have to initiate the charge. Better systems provide a way (such as base don Stripe Checkout) that lets the client click a link, enter their payment info for that one transaction, and optionally store the info at Stripe for next time.)
• Literally zero support for any kind of group sessions, much less the full ability to book arbitrary client for a Tuesday night drop-in support groups.

• No data export feature. They say it is coming, but a database-centric product without data export on Day One is a red flag.

• Feature-poor. It’s a young product, with IMO far too many shortcomings to be viable for a real practice. Their feature requests page includes such basics as:

  • no support for patient intake/history forms in client portal
  • no ability to sign notes
  • no ability for patient to opt out of SMS reminders
  • no ability for clients to upload docs to their portal (prior lab results for example)
  • no client search by phone or email

When evaluating practice management software for therapists, Theranest www.theranest.com gets thumbs down for the following reason:

• Holds your data hostage. If you decide to use Theranest a while, they seem to want to make it as painful as possible to take your marbles (data) if you close your account.
  • Will not export client notes as text. (A printout or PDF is useless when it comes time to import data into a new system. And you know that Theranest knows that.)
  • Will not export client session history as text, not even just dates of past or future sessions.
  • Will not export client payments as text.
• Literally impossible to schedule support group meetings where the attendees change from meeting to meeting.

Whether or not support group scheduling is important to your practice, as a matter of principle and practicality you should, in my opinion. reject ANY application that doe snot offer complete data portability.