Your industry is unique and so is your business. You struggle to balance your work, scheduling, cancelations, documents, and the financials with too many disconnected systems and manual processes. As you know, there are many great systems out there for occupational therapy and related fields but few are comprehensive offering everything you need to manage your business.

One of the best approaches is to utilize a best-of-breed strategy where you select the absolute best and most comprehensive application available for managing the day-to-day challenges of your business. A good place to evaluate occupational therapy systems is Capterra. The online directory is among the most comprehensive in the industry and includes background information on both the products and the vendors as well as reviews by users to help you navigate the overwhelming number of options available.

One product that sticks out to us is Pediatric Therapy EMR. With over 47 reviews and a five-star rating, it appears to be a leader in the category. Some other applications on the market to consider are TheraOffice, HENO, and CentralRreach – all rated five stars but with considerably fewer reviews.

The most prolific applications in the market tend to be systems that cross disciplines and are popular in other medical and healthcare segments. These products are well established for occupational therapy but may tend to have fewer specific features than others that are specific to the occupational therapy field. The more general business applications to consider are SimplePractice, WebPT, InsightEMR, PT Practice Pro, and Optima Therapy for SNFs.

We suggest that you select at least six to eight different systems to evaluate. Watch a brief overview demo of each one, talk to the vendors, read the reviews, and pick your top three to four favorite applications. Next, invite the vendors to provide a more in-depth demonstration. Score each one based on multiple factors including overall functionality, technology and platform, total cost of ownership (include maintenance, upgrades, installation, configuration, training, hosting, hardware, and other factors), and company stability and viability.

Select your two favorites based on the in-depth presentations. You can ask for follow-up demos or technical discussions to separate the two products if needed and make sure that you ask for a final proposal and references. Make your final decision and commit the time and resources needed to implement the product based on the recommendations of the publisher. After all, they know the product better than you and most implementations fail when companies try to self-implement not knowing the right way to utilize the software.

There’s no need to worry if the system you pick doesn’t have an integrated back-end accounting system. Simply find a great partner like e2b teknologies to help you integrate it with a modern accounting system like Sage Intacct which is very popular for medical and healthcare businesses because of it is secure (HIPAA compliant database), on the cloud for faster deployments and minimal infrastructure costs, and affordable starting at just a fraction of the cost of traditional, purchased accounting systems.Read more about turning to the cloud for financial management.