Do you ever feel like your mental health practice is getting a little cluttered?
When you’re a solo practitioner, it’s absolutely vital to keep your practice organized. You need to be able to find everything necessary for the smooth operation of your office at a moment’s notice, whether that be an invoice or a client’s emergency contact information. Unfortunately, things can rapidly spiral out of control when you’re juggling everything by yourself, which can tank your productivity.
At Owl Practice, we specialize in helping practices of all shapes and sizes keep everything organized. With that in mind, here are a few of our favourite tips that we suggest to solo practitioners who need to take their organization game up a notch.
Time to Declutter
In both your personal life and work life, clutter can be one of the biggest obstacles to staying organized and productive. It’s challenging to work in a space that’s packed with mess, which is why decluttering is an essential part of a good organizational strategy.
You might say, “But I don’t have any clutter in my practice!” You might be surprised! Take all of your computer wires, for example. If you have a ton of random USB devices, plugs, and cables littering your desk or on the floor along the wall, that counts as stressful clutter! If this sounds like your workspace, it might be time to do a little wire decluttering.
Fortunately, this is easy. You simply need to buy some inexpensive cable ties to ensure that cables go neatly from your computer to your devices and the wall. Then, on your desk, you can use binder clips to group together the ends of the cables and keep them organized.
Decluttering can also include the process of shifting to a paperless office. It suddenly becomes much easier to think when you don’t have stacks of paper across your desk. Plus, it’s much simpler to find a client’s file, for example, when all you need to do is plug their name into a search field in Owl Practice. You can find more reasons why you should go paperless here!
Make Better Use of Your Calendar
Now that we’ve talked about physical clutter, what about the clutter that’s messing up your calendar?
When you see multiple clients daily, you need to ensure that you have an optimized schedule. Otherwise, you could double-book yourself by accident. Thankfully, Owl Practice is ready to help with this problem.
For example, how about letting your clients book their own appointments? All you need to do is put your availability into Owl, and your clients can log into your client portal and see available slots for their appointment. When they book a slot, you’ll get a notification.
Even better, thanks to Owl’s automatic reminders, your clients will get sent notifications to help them remember their upcoming appointment. That can dramatically cut down on no-shows!
Streamline Your Client Records
When it comes to your clients, you need to ensure that you can access their records quickly and easily. Whether clinical notes or their emergency contact information, that info should be at your fingertips. And that’s what you get with Owl Practice!
Rather than having clinical notes, contacts, and other critical information in separate places, you can find them all in your Owl Practice database. This automated organization can dramatically improve your productivity and reduce the stress of constantly making sure you’re filing information in the right place.
For example, you can find all of your clients’ contact info in their Circle of Care. This feature allows you to specify relationships between contacts—especially valuable if you offer family therapy—create linked accounts, get access to billing information, and much more.
You can also find all of your clinical notes and records from within Owl. Not only will you get unlimited storage, allowing you to store files in a client’s records, but all of that information will be securely stored on our fully PHIPA and College Compliant Canadian servers.
Automatic Backup
Remembering to back up data on a daily basis can be frustrating, but it’s non-negotiable for practitioners. You need to make sure that all of your client files and information would be safe and secure if something were to happen at your practice.
With Owl Practice, we take care of your backups for you. We store them in our two Canadian servers—one in Quebec, one in Toronto. So, even if something were to go wrong with one of the servers, everything would be safe and secure on the other. And since all the encrypted data is regularly backed up, you never need to worry about losing your invaluable practice records!
Good organization is key to being a successful solo practitioner, but it can be difficult to manage everything yourself. That’s why we always suggest using a practice management solution specifically designed for therapists and other mental health professionals.
We invite you to sign up for a 14-day free trial with Owl Practice to see if we’re a good fit for you! And if you have any other questions about our intake form features or comments about our services, please contact us at support@owlpractice.ca.
As Always,
Practice Wisely
