CleverPsych Practice Management System
Free software for psychologists and other allied health
professionals who run their own practices
The system enables you to record your clients, appointments,
services, referring doctors, associates and organisations, and has
the aim of making operations like generating standard letters,
sending reminders, claiming from government and insurance companies,
and reporting income, much easier.
We developed CleverPsych to run our own psychology practice, and
have been using it since 2007. The software is suitable to manage
your single practitioner practice, particularly if you are a
psychologist or other allied health professional.
CleverPsych is free, and can be downloaded
from SourceForge.
Look in the Files
tab for download and installation instructions, and how to set
up CleverPsych for your practice.
You can try out CleverPsych with the demonstration system, and
then start using it for your clients. The software usually runs
directly on your Windows, Mac or Linux computer.
The latest CleverPsych is version 12.5, released March 2021. You can
upgrade manually to version 12.6 after November 2023, by downloading
some files; see the instructions in the SourceForge CleverPsych
project Files tab.
There are some Australian MEDICARE features which appear if you are
located in an Australian time zone.
CleverPsych Features
- Free practice management software
- Download desktop standard version for Windows, Mac or Linux
- For a sole practitioner (run a version for each practitioner)
- Track clients/patients and their appointments and services
provided
- Store referrals (and referring doctors)
- Appointments diary
- Generate letters, reports, treatment notes, etc using template
files
- Print practice reports (income, clients, appointments etc)
- Display histograms, diagrams of practice statistics
- Send Emails and SMS messages
- Send appointment reminders to clients
- Receive daily list of appointments via mail or SMS
- Configure the system for your practice
- Demonstration database, manuals, videos and web site
- Medicare Australia claiming included
- Easy copy of appointment info to external web sites
- Source code.
- Can run on a web server to allow browser access.
- Cloud storage for backup, HIPPA, HITECH and GDPR compliance
e.g. OneDrive, Google GSuite
- Interface to other Apps that provide additional features.
Follow these links to find how to manage your
practice
Clients and Appointments
Services
Organisations
Referrers
Associates
Diary
Filtering
Documents
Reports
Histograms
Plots
Relationships
Mail and SMS
Reminders
Daily Clients
Configuration
External Web Sites
Windows Download
Mac OS Download
Linux Download
Download Problems
Tutorial videos
Running CleverPsych
Set up your practice
File System
Cloud Services
Execution in Browsers
About Us
Contact us
FAQ
Updates
Guarantee
Java source code
Medicare
How we manage our practice
We continually develop the CleverPsych software to help us run our
practice. It reflects the way we operate and our experience over 15
years. The software highlights errors and flags tasks. Practice
settings are held in configuration files that are edited.
We are a Clinical psychologist, an office manager who works part
time, and a retired software developer (and husband of the psych)
who looks after the computer system and book keeping. We run the
practice so the psychologist can concentrate on her clients' needs
and professional requirements.
Our new clients typically arrive with a referral from their doctor.
Our books are closed, and demand is huge, especially with covid lock
downs.
Our office manager filters new clients. We give priority to those
whose doctors contact us, or have serious or interesting problems.
We do not give reports or letters to clients who we have not seen
several times e.g. we do not take new clients who just want a letter
for court and have no interest in therapy.
New clients must sign intake forms which describe our services and
costs, and give permission for actions. Both parents or guardians
must sign for a child. Government regulatory agencies facilitate
submission of malicious complaints, so you need to protect yourself;
we are careful of clients who have had vicious relationship
breakdowns, especially where children are a major issue. We are
careful that we can maintain client confidentiality within families.
We must have email addresses so we can prove correspondence has been
sent.
New clients are given a 1.5 hour first appointment and their basic
details are recorded via the software. When they attend, their
situation and therapy is discussed, and it is established whether
they want to come again. If so, relevant details are collected that
can be entered into CleverPsych, and some future appointments
scheduled. The software indicates what must be done and client
information that must be entered.
Clients have a type, which is often determined how we are paid e.g.
private, insurance, medicare etc. They also have a status e.g. new
client, waiting for appointment, treatment complete.
Clients typically phone to make appointments for 1 hour sessions at
our office. Theoretically this is for 50 minutes + 10 minutes
administration. Appointments are time based, and there are
variations e.g. 30 minute sessions, video calls, out-of-office. We
find it easier to maintain a standard paper diary and regularly keep
the software diary synchronised.
Appointments appear in the CleverPsych diary. There can also be
group appointments e.g. for addicts (but we do not run courses).
There are also services e.g. writing reports and letters, and you
can allocate your time to these in the diary.
CleverPsych can be configured for your Email address and to send SMS
messages using an email-to-sms provider.
We get email and SMS messages every work night listing the
appointments for the next day.
No-shows are a major problem for us, but this is largely our fault,
as we are too lenient. Clients are reminded the day before an
appointment, and they reply "Y" they are coming, "N" if not, or "V"
if they want a video session. This gives our office manager time to
schedule someone else from the wait list if they are not attending.
Both SMS and Email reminders are sent, as we find that clients often
change their phone numbers without advising us, or they have no
credit and cannot reply. We can flag problem clients, and they are
sent another reminder just before the appointment.
We set the maximum numbers of appointments in referrals and per year
for each client to make sure we do not exceed the number of
sessions, and to indicate when to write to doctors.
At the end of an appointment, the client usually pays; we use our
bank EFTPOS terminal to accept payment. In most cases we submit a
claim to MEDICARE on the client's behalf, or send a bulk-bill claim,
in which case the benefit soon arrives in our bank account. An
invoice or receipt can be printed. The appointment status is set in
the system e.g. claimed, paid, invoiced, owed etc
Our office manager will later do any follow up processing e.g.
sending invoices to insurance companies or claiming through web
sites (there are facilities for easy copying of information to web
pages). The software highlights what needs to be done.
We use the templates that come with CleverPsych and some for our
practice to generate letters and report outlines. We have modified
templates (using Word) to add our practice headers and logos.
The software can print reports and display diagrams of practice
activity, but does not provide accounting facilities as there are
plenty of commercial applications that cost a few dollars / month.
We put all payments through our business bank account and use
Quickbooks for general business accounting, payroll and tax.
Quickbooks accesses and processes the bank transactions
according to rules we have set up, and it all happens without much
effort.
We store all the software directories on Dropbox, so everything is
automatically backed up and we can run a copy of the system from
home. The software supports One Drive, Google Drive and Dropbox but
any other Cloud storage could be used.
We have had other psychologists working in our office and sharing
the facilities and manager. We simply ran another version of
CleverPsych to support their clients.
CleverPsych Limitations
The software is not suitable for:
- Medical practices; as it does not store patient diagnoses or
standard medical treatments.
- Hospitals that want to handle many patients at the same time
each with multiple services.
- Practices that provide multiple services with different
charges during an appointment (unless there are items for
defined grouped services)
