How to use ALMA for your group practice
In this article, I am going to walk you through how to use ALMA for a group practice so you can decide whether or not this set-up would work for you. ALMA is a platform designed to help make private practice operations easier. ALMA helps with referrals, billing, credentialing, and much more. It’s hard to argue that ALMA doesn’t make solo private practice easier. It certainly does. But can you use ALMA for your group practice…? Yes and no. Let me explain.
ALMA does not advertise as a platform built for group practices. When I set up a call ( a few years ago) to ask this question, they said no. Since that time, I have seen ALMA proposing a workflow, but it’s quite janky. Let’s go through how this would work if you decided to use ALMA for your group practice.
Using ALMA for Your Group Practice
You need to set up a call with an ALMA team member to share that you want to use ALMA for your group practice. They will help you get your bank account and EIN number linked up to all the therapists accounts.
Every therapist in your practice has to have their own profile on ALMA. This means they need to go through the same on boarding and credentialing process you did when signing up. This process would also set them up to run their own solo practice through ALMA if they wanted to. This clearly leads to some issues because if they can sign up on their own that easily, why would they want to be a part of a group practice.
Each therapist has to pay the membership fee. As the group practice owner you would then cover this fee for all your therapists.
Each therapist has their own account and their own calendars. This makes it challenging because as the administrator you would then have to log in to every account separately and manage all the calendars and billing that way. This can get very chaotic, very quick.
Consultation requests would be received by the individual therapists and not the group practice administrator. You would need to find a way to manage separate emails for each account to monitor the referrals that come in. Again, this can get chaotic, quick.
Only fully licensed clinicians can use ALMA. If you hire provisionally licensed folks they can not use ALMA. Additionally, you can not do incident-to or supervisory billing on ALMA. This is another limiting factor.
What Needs to Change?
In order for ALMA to be an effective group practice tool they will need to develop a platform where there can be one account owner that manages all the other accounts. In other words the group practice owner would log into one account and be able to manage all the therapists appointments/billing/etc., in one place. I am hoping that ALMA will work to develop this feature as I think it would benefit folks looking to expand into a group practice.
Next steps
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