Do you need a better way to track the number of sessions that insurers have approved for a client?
Does your practice offer clients service packages?
Do clients get a discount if they buy a pack of sessions up-front?
If you’re still tracking session counts manually, you need to get with the times! Automatic session tracking and reporting are powerful features baked into Power Diary, and they’ll save your practice a lot of time and money in the long run.
No more forgetting to count a client session, and no more repeatedly going over the number of sessions approved by your client’s insurer.
This article is based on a recent Power Talks webinar entitled Session Packs Demystified, hosted by Damien Adler, Registered Psychologist, co-founder of Power Diary and Head of Customer Success and Irina Shvetsova, session-pack guru and Lead Knowledge Base Writer.
What are Session Packs?
Let’s start with the basics.
Session packs are a powerful and often underutilised feature in Power Diary. Initially, they were introduced to track client sessions, but they can also be used to track hours and money.
Many clients also use session packs to ensure they stay within the limits of what insurers and funders have approved for use.
Benefits of Session Packs
They Reduce User Error
If you’re tracking sessions manually, you may forget to invoice for a session, and if you get your tracking wrong, it can significantly impact your bottom line. It’s also more difficult to determine how many sessions a client has left, so you may inadvertently go over the number of sessions.
They Simplify Claiming from Insurance
Tracking Medicare (AU), health care plans and NDIS (AU) service plans are the most popular use case. As Damien explains,
“If we’re talking about Medicare and someone has a certain number of sessions allocated under their plan, and then you go over that, and you haven’t had gone back to the GP for an update or a re-referral, at the end of the day the practitioner, according to Medicare, is responsible if a Medicare rebate was provided when they weren’t eligible for it. And Medicare does go through and provide or conduct audits.”
He continues with another example,
“In the UK, for instance, if a certain number of sessions or budget has been allocated by the private health insurance, and more sessions or more services are provided, then the claim won’t go through. So often, the practitioner is left pursuing the client for that or wearing the lost revenue.”
This also extends to NDIS, when significant sums of money can be allocated under a plan and if the services exceed the cap or it’s outside the time range, then the claim will not be approved.
They Allow for Seamless Reporting Across Departments
You can apply categories to your session pack templates so that if you provide different types of services and want to report on the sales of different departments when you run your reports, the correct proportion of each package will be correctly allocated.
How to Use Session Packs
1. Setting Up Session Pack Templates
This is the starting point for implementing session packs in your practice. Session pack templates can be set up to track:
- Number of Sessions
- Fixed Amount of Hours
- Fixed Amount of Money
If you want to start setting up session pack templates, this Knowledge Base article will help; it covers how to create a session pack template, view and edit existing session pack templates, and activate deactivated session pack templates.
2. Using Session Packs
Once you have your templates, you can start using them in your practice.
New session packs can be added from:
- Within an existing appointment, used when you have received a new referral and are booking the client’s first appointment within this referral or when a client is buying a pack of sessions and booking the first session within the package.
- A client’s profile is useful if you’ve received a new referral, but there is no booked appointment for this client yet; you have a new client who has already used a part of their referral with a different practice, or a client has bought a pack of sessions and has not been booked for an appointment yet.
- An invoice, for when you’ve forgotten to assign a completed session in advance, or if you’ve provided some sessions already that you want to add retroactively.
With Power Diary you can assign session packs as a client’s default service and receive notifications when a session pack expires. There is also a Session Packs Expiry Report you can run to quickly see who has active session packs, which ones are about to expire and which ones have already expired.
3. Editing or Deleting Session Packs
Session packs are incredibly flexible, so if you’ve made a mistake, Power Diary makes it easy to:
- Consolidate session packs, if a client has multiple session packs open
- Remove a session pack from an invoice
- Delete a session pack
- Apply the correct session pack to an invoice
Tips and Tricks
To see examples of session packs in action, the Power Talks webinar walks through some common scenarios from the 15-minute mark.
Here are two common ones:
Scenario 1: New Referral, Already Used Some Sessions with a Different Practitioner
The client has come to your practice with a referral for ten sessions but has already used four sessions with a different practitioner. You would like to continue providing the services within the referral, but you need to count the remaining sessions correctly.
To get the count right, navigate to the Client Profile → Billing → Session packs and add the new pack using your ten-session package template. But, you then customise the package to make the maximum number of units six instead of ten. The result is that you have created a new ten-session package for the client that hasn’t been used yet and has only six units available.
Scenario 2: New Referral, Waiting for Funding
When setting up a pack and waiting for funding to come through or for a particular allocation, you can set up a pack with a high budget to get started. Then, once you get the letter confirming exactly what needs to be included in the pack, whether it’s money, time, or sessions, you can quickly make the necessary edits.
For example, you could set the initial budget at $100,000, then the funding comes through, and it’s actually for $3,000; you can make the update, and the system will automatically recalculate and let you know that you’ve used X amount of the $3,000.
Healthcare Disciplines That Use Session Packs
If you typically see clients for multiple appointments within a specific period, session packs will save you a lot of time and money. So, while any practice that has a use case can set up session packs, they are often used by:
- Psychologists
- Physiotherapists
- Personal Trainers
- Massage Therapists
- School Counsellors
- Occupational Therapists
- Speech Therapists
- And more!
Getting Started with Session Packs
The Power Diary Knowledge Base has several articles on session packs, including how to use session packs, set up session pack templates and make corrections.
If you want to walk through the process with one of our team, head over to Live Chat or Book a Call, and we’ll take you through how to utilise session packs and answer any questions.
We’re always open to feedback, or if you have some clever ways that you use session packs in your business, please do let us know, so we can share them with other practice owners and add them to our Knowledge Base.
