Mid to large ABA companies need an all-in-one practice management solution that includes data collection and graphing, while also being HIPAA compliant (or compliant to your country’s privacy laws).
Not all ABA software is created equally. Most have the core features of EMR management, data collection, billing, scheduling and session note management. However, each has its own unique features that can contribute to better behavioral health and mental health outcomes for your clients.
In this article you’ll find a summary of the best software for large ABA therapy practices so you can narrow down what might be right for your company and jump right into a demo for yourself.
Tool Shortlist
Here’s a list of the best ABA practice management software for enterprise ABA providers or related therapy practices:
- AlohaABA
- ABA Matrix
- Portia
- MeasurePM
- ReThink
- Total Therapy (formerly Total ABA, now owned by ReThink)
- NPAWorks (Code Metro)
- Theralytics
- Noteable
- TherapyNotes
ABA Practice Management Software Comparison Criteria
Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Is it clean and attractive?
- Usability: Is it easy to learn and master? Does the company offer good tech support, user support, tutorials, and training? Will this tool be easy for an RBT, parent or school staff to use for data collection?
- Integrations: Is it easy to connect with other tools? Any pre-built integrations?
- Value for Pricing: How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent, and flexible?
Key Features
The following are some key features I consider when determining the best use case. These are features that therapy providers can consider when deciding on which software is best for your company’s needs, as no one software will be best for every behavioral health practice.
- ABA Data Collection: Does the software do standard celeration charting? What dimensions of behavior can it measure? Does it include ABC data?
- Billing Software: Does it have the capacity for medical billing? Can invoicing be done directly to the payer (e.g., insurance company or government) or must invoices be exported to another platform like Quickbooks?
- EHR and Document Management: Can documents such as consent forms and treatment plans be stored on the platform and if so, for how long? Are there limitations to how many documents can be stored on the platform?
- Practice Management System: Can the tool schedule appointments and staffing? How can the software help streamline the process of scheduling staff with specific clients for aba therapy sessions?
- Workflow: Does the software provide any support for improving your workflow such as flagging administrative tasks that need to be completed or provide any prompts towards incomplete tasks?
- Privacy law compliance: Is it HIPAA compliant? Does the company also have servers located outside of the US? If so, where, and are they compliant with that country’s privacy laws?
- Pre-made programs and goals: Many platforms have a library of goals and programs to draw on that can be individualized to your learner.
- School Use: Is this product suitable for school staff to be using either for an outside clinician or school-based practitioner?
- Video modeling: We know how powerful and effective video modeling can be for staff and parents. Does this tool allow for video models to be embedded into the parent/school staff portal?
- Messaging: Is there an internal messaging system between the clinician and staff or a parent working with the child? Is there a way for team members to communicate in real-time?
Overviews Of The 10 Best ABA Practice Management Software For Small Practices
Here’s a brief description of each of the top software for enterprise ABA and other behavioral health practices to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
1. AlohaABA – Most intuitive ABA practise management software
AlohaABA provides ABA practice management software designed in response to shortcomings in the sector. AlohaABA has designed their system with a similar look and function to Google Calendar and Forms, making it really easy to figure out.
Interacting with AlohaABA is a refreshing experience in the behavioral health industry, as they remain a privately held company, and that personalized touch is felt by their customers. They are responsive to feedback from their clients and are able to increase functionality on a regular basis.
In addition to having scheduling, billing, payroll and staff management , AlohaABA has an exceptional business analytics dashboard. It’s a clean and simple interface showing you snapshots of data about your business. Throughout the program, everything looks organized and straightforward with dropdowns and checkboxes making your workflow efficient.
Other interesting features include automated mileage with a Google Maps API, custom forms, icons in the calendar to show how time is being used at a glance and really responsive tech support.
AlohaABA has plans to integrate with Motivity for data collection. At the time of writing, this integration is not yet functional for the general population but stay tuned!
AlohaABA costs $27.99 per user (staff) per month, and they provide a free 1 month trial.
2. ABA Matrix – Best for staff supervision
ABA Matrix is ABA Practice Management software by Hex Matrix that has a unique, straightforward and affordable billing model. Customers are billed per hour of work completed each month. If you have clients that are in the system but not active for a period of time, you are not billed while they are not in active treatment. For example, during the summer, family vacations or illness.
Other great features of ABA Matrix include customized session notes (template is provided), RBT and caregiver competency checks (Called ‘RBT Coordinator’), graphing, data collection and scheduling.
ABA Matrix integrates with Tellus (Netsmart) EVV to verify sessions with Medicaid. This is done through their app. Otherwise, all work is done through a browser. It can and was designed to work on mobile phones.
While highly dependent on where you live, payors such as insurance or government funding don’t often allow for a 30 hour week of ABA treatment. This can also depend on the age of a client or their needs. Every ‘unit’ of work is 15 minutes. Units are billed at $0.09 cents or $0.36 per hour of work.
Therefore, if you have a client doing 5 hours per week (20 hours per month), the cost is $7.20. Clients doing 10 hours per week (40 hours per month) would cost $14.40, monthly.
A free 14 day trial is offered upon request.
3. Portia – Best for early intervention clinics
Early intervention funding for ABA tends to be higher than school-age funding in many places. If your clients are doing more than 13 hours of ABA or other behavioral health services per week, Portia is the most affordable option.
Founded in Canada over 10 years ago, Portia provides a ton of core and special features for a very reasonable price. It was originally created to serve the needs of their own ABA clinic, so they know the ins and outs of clinic-based services.
Not only does their practice management software have all the important features including scheduling, billing, an app-based parent portal with a messaging system and EHR/EMR management capabilities, but they have a data collection system with an embedded curriculum. Their curriculum is based on VB-MAPP and ABLLS-R, but designed by their clinic over the last 10 years.
Practice management is done through a desktop browser and app, which works on both Apple and Android devices. Sessions can be pre-loaded, data collected out of wifi and then later will be synced to the cloud when the device is back in wifi.
Portia can integrate directly to your clearinghouse for billing. Portia has the ability to bill for OT, PT and SLP services as well, making it a great choice for multi-disciplinary behavioral health clinics.
Portia’s software costs $19.99/month per client and contracts run on a month-to-month basis with no start-up fee. A free trial is available. Discounts are available for 51 or more clients.
Portia offers insurance billing as an add-on feature. Self-serve billing costs $10/month per client and full-service billing costs 4% of collected claims or 5% of collected claims if you would like them to also manage verification of benefits and obtaining authorization.
4. Measure PM – Best for revenue cycle management
Measure PM is an ABA practice management software company based in California, incorporated in 2020. Although newer to the ABA software space, they bring a great product to the table with a focus on revenue cycle management and understanding your business’s metrics.
Measure PM truly is an end-to-end solution with no need to integrate with other programs or software. The dashboard view can be customized to select various business-related data that you want displayed upon first opening the dashboard. You will be able to see the metrics that are most important to you in order to regularly have a snapshot of the health of your company. The clean interface of the dashboard uses a tile format, making each graph or chart easy to read in an uncluttered manner.
The business analytics make use of artificial intelligence to analyze your business’ data. Their founders have a background not only in ABA but finance and IT as well. This combination brings a unique balance to the functionality of the software catering to both the clinical and business sides of your practice.
This software is hosted on Microsoft Azure so there are servers in Canada and Australia in addition to the US. Data is backed up every 15 minutes. At the time of writing, they have not yet had any downtime/outages.
Measure PM starts at $400/month + $30/client for up to 100 clients (volume discounts available beyond that).
Billing services are on top of the monthly base rate. To add billing the cost is 5% of receivables for up to $500,000 and beyond this you would have a custom contract.
5. ReThink – Best for add-on features
ReThink is an award-winning behavioral health software company providing ABA practice management and data collection software. Based in New York, the company is one of the fastest growing privately held companies. Their most recent acquisition is of Total Therapy (previously known as Total ABA) to compete in the OT, PT and SLP software space.
ReThink is great for large behavioral health agencies because the software has a ton of useful add-on features including a 40 hour RBT training, a parent training about autism and full-service billing. Practices that can afford these add on features will be well-served by the usefulness of these features all within the same system.
They have developed their own Medical Necessity Assessment which helps clinicians determine and recommend an appropriate dosage of ABA treatment for a client. The assessment that takes 10-15 minutes to complete, leads to creation of a report that is then sent to the client’s payor for approval.
Another add-on feature is their app called TheraWe. Via the app, clinicians can do synchronous or asynchronous telehealth with caregivers or RBTs through video conferencing or the uploading and secure storage of videos recorded in the field. There are also messaging/chat capabilities in the app either for the whole team or individuals.
ReThink has an a la carte pricing format so the monthly fees can cost anywhere from $20-$60 per individual.
6. TotalTherapy – Best for customizations
Total Therapy is an all-in-one ABA software solution that is built on the Salesforce platform, allowing nimble customization of the software. The core software has billing, clinical tools such as data collection and scheduling, practice management capabilities and a parent portal.
Many components of the software can be customized. For example, if you want a specific type of report set- up from scratch or customized fillable forms, that can easily be done. Integrations with other software are also customizable, due to the Salesforce infrastructure. Right now it integrates with Quickbooks, E-Fax, Tableaux and other APIs. Additional integrations (APIs) have additional fees, but are easily created.
Other benefits to being on the Salesforce platform is that it has no limit to the number of clients it can hold without compromising functionality, it has servers all over the world and rarely has outages, all while being HIPAA compliant.
Total Therapy’s practice management software has a minimum base cost of $35/staff person with a minimum of 100 licenses. This goes down to $30 with 250 licenses and $25 for 500+ licenses.
For both the practice management and data collection/clinical tools, the cost is $45/staff per month, again with the 100 license minimum (or $40/staff for 250+ licenses and $30 for 500+ licenses). Adding on the parent portal costs $8 per family for a minimum of 100 licenses, $5 per family for 250+ licenses and $3/family for 500+ licenses.
7. NPAWorks by CodeMetro – Best for scheduling multi-site teams
The Scheduling Genie in NPAWorks allows granular criteria such as credentials, skills, needs and preferences to match staff and clients. Teams can be created across clinics accordingly with NPA Teams. This tool allows consistency for learners and staff across offices while making schedule large multi-site staff teams easier.
NPAGo is their app that can be used on mobile devices with wifi and allows automated messaging to staff and parents. Parents can receive reminders about appointments, view session notes and sign off on sessions.
NPAWorks integrates with Quickbooks. For Accounting and HR purposes, NPAWorks integrates with many other software including ADP, Sage, Tricore, Paychex, CompuPay SCI, Harpers, Insperity, People HRO, Oasis, Paycom, WebPay, UltiPro and BigFish. For data collection purposes, it integrates with Catalyst as both are owned by Therapy Brands.
NPAWorks costs $21/user monthly for 200+ clients.
8. Theralytics– Best customer service support
Theralytics is an ABA software company founded by a BCBA providing an end-to-end aba software solution for behavioral health practices of any size.
A common theme from Theralytics clients is their exceptional customer service and payroll capabilities. This is in addition to their other features such as clinical features like data collection, reporting and scheduling to other admin tasks like billing, EHR management and billing.
Theraytics is able to create custom reports for payroll that can be input directly into your payroll software such as Gusto, ADP or Intuit. If there are specific laws in your jurisdiction about overtime or mileage, they can take care of that too. However, an additional fee applies to the customization. I have found timesheets and mileage to be the most frustrating and needlessly time-consuming part of my job at times. Who got into behavioral health services to do admin? Not me! Having this automated for your staff can really save time and money for both clinical and administrative staff.
Theraytics starts at $15/client/month for only practice management, or only data collection. However, if you get the full package of data collection and practice management software, it costs $25/client/month. They have a 10 client minimum.
9. Noteable – Best for community-based behavioral health agencies
Notable is a software company based in Virginia, providing a software solution for multi-clinician agencies providing community based behavioral health services. They serve a number of large social service agencies including but not limited to Virginia Institute of Autism, Attachment & Trauma Institute, Virginia Family Services, Achieve Pediatric Therapy and Infinity Counseling Group.
While it definitely works for Applied Behavior Analysis, Noteable is great for any behavioral and mental health agency. Noteable includes a telehealth platform, electronic health record management, analytics, data collection, billing, session notes, scheduling and a few other practice management tools useful for residential care settings or other healthcare agencies.
One really neat feature they have on their telehealth platform is to have one of the three allowed parties to be an “observer.” This is really helpful for remote and community-based supervision purposes as the client is notified that the supervisor is watching but they can’t see them to minimize distraction during the telehealth session.
Their data collection app is straightforward and designed for mobile devices. Sessions can be run in offline mode, not as a work-around but with intentional design. A clinician simply has to pre-load the session they plan to run and take data while offline in a group home, family home or other community location. When the device is back in wifi, all information syncs immediately. Geolocation for EVV can be turned on or off and embedded in session notes.
Agencies serving a diverse population with behavioral, developmental and mental health services will find Noteable useful for managing large staff teams across community-based programs. A feature I really like for this is their workflow for task completion when multiple people need to be involved. If you punt a task to another staff member, you see a red visual cue that indicates it’s not complete. The next time the other staff person logs in, they will see a visual notification of a red dot beside the task, indicating it needs to be completed. When they complete their portion, a notification comes back to the assigning staff sign off. I like this safeguard that keeps everyone accountable.
Their payroll capabilities run reports that can be directly input to ADP, Quickbooks or other payroll software. The software tracks not only hours and pay but mileage as well.
Noteable starts at $240/month for your first 20 clients. Beyond this, each client added costs $12 monthly.
10. Therapy Notes – Best for multidisciplinary clinics
Therapy Notes is an award-winning behavioral and mental health software solution serving a wide variety of behavioral, mental and physical healthcare providers.
As a behavior analyst I really hope multi-disciplinary practices can become the norm rather than the exception in North America. Tools like TherapyNotes can make these services easier to manage communication and collaboration between clinicians serving the same clients.
Teaching, supervising and mentoring interns is a significant part of most behavioral and healthcare practices. TherapyNotes allows interns to have a discounted account in the system so they can be part of learning and collaborating on client care.
TherapyNotes is great for multi-disciplinary practices where behavioral, mental and physical healthcare services are all included because of other add-on tools such as credit card billing and ePrescribe for medications. Another great tool is their telehealth feature which is included in the base plan, but only facilitates 1:1 sessions so not as great for collaborative meetings between clinicians.
I really like how easy it is for various clinicians to create session and contact notes for a common client and also select privacy settings on each individual note. It’s easy to create notes for contact, using their drop down options or create your own reason for the contact.
The organization of communication and session notes allows for efficient communication amongst the care team. It also allows you to select if the client is billed for the time on contact notes or not. It took no time to figure out the basic functions of the system without a tutorial or training.
TherapyNotes starts at $59/month for the first clinician and $30/month for each additional staff person.
Other ABA Practice Management Software Options For Mid to Large Practices
Here are a few other options offering behavioral health practice management software:
- Central Reach – A large player in the ABA practice management software space, they are used by many large ABA companies in the US. Central Reach provides the full suite of services from intake to clinical provision to revenue cycle management.
- AccuPoint Enterprise – Integrates with Catalyst for data collection.
- GoLotus – Useful for multi-disciplinary practices with SLP, OT and PTs.
- Skills Global – Focused on data collection and other clinical tools, Skills also offers staff management, scheduling and tracking of funding sources.
Which products may serve clients outside of the US?
If you’re a behavioral health practice outside of the US, check out Portia and MeasurePM to see if their software suits your local privacy laws. Both host data in Canada and Australia.
Which product is the most affordable?
There are a few factors that you one must consider for their own business before a product can objectively be considered the most affordable. However, let’s run a scenario for an enterprise behavioral or mental health agency with 200 staff, 2,400 clients (e.g., 12 clients per staff) and 20,000 billable hours per month (e.g., each clinician reaching about 100 billable hours monthly). What I do not include in these scenarios is add-on features or full-service billing as the rates for these vary quite a bit based on your practice’s needs.
Let’s compare the price point when combining both PM and data collection software to get a picture of your most expensive scenario. In this case, Noteable is your most affordable option at $2,000/month. The second most affordable all-in-one option is ABA Matrix at $7,200 per month, followed by Total Therapy at $10,600/month (This is for clinical, practice management and the parent portal. Their PM software on its own would be $5,000/month).
If looking at only practice management software, Notable is still your most affordable software as you can’t purchase the PM software on its own (but you can purchase the data collection suite on its own). TherapyNotes is the second most affordable option for PM software at $3,039 (e.g., 150 clinicians at $30, 49 interns at $20 and the first clinician costs $59). Coming in third-most affordable option is NPA Works for $4,200 monthly.
Which might be best for school-based practice management?
In a situation like a school district where scheduled learner hours are high and staff numbers are low, Noteable is probably your best bet, paying only $10/month per staff person for 41+ staff. This would be useful if you want to make use of scheduling features for school-based and district staff in addition to their data collection suite.
Their app is pretty intuitive so when you have staff with a range of comfort with technology, that can make all the difference between data being collected or not.
What Do You Think?
Leave a comment with your thoughts on the software you currently use. By commenting on your experience, we help other clinicians make the right choice of software. I’d love to hear what you think about behavioral health practice management software.
Disclosures: At the time of publishing, no remuneration was received from any company listed in this blog post in exchange for being featured here.