Occupational therapy software for pediatric and cash OTs

Which OT practices this fits

The private OT practices served here resemble their speech and ABA neighbours: pediatric sensory and developmental clinics, cash-based hand therapy and specialty practices, and multi-discipline clinics where OT shares a schedule with speech or ABA.

Hospital-based and inpatient OT runs on institutional systems with requirements this product does not cover, and is not the intended audience.

What this occupational therapy software includes

Timed units in OT, and the rule that is not the same rule

OT bills the same timed-code structure as physical therapy, and the counting rule under Medicare Part B outpatient therapy applies to occupational therapy in the same way. That much genuinely transfers. What does not transfer is the assumption that every payer counts the same way.

Two counting methods exist, and they disagree. Medicare totals all timed minutes in the visit and converts that total into units on a single ladder — which means minutes from different services combine, and a service delivered for only a few minutes can still contribute to a billable unit. The other method, used by a number of commercial payers, evaluates each code on its own against its own increment, so short services do not combine and may not be billable at all.

The same visit can therefore yield a different number of units depending on whose card the patient carries. A practice that learned one method and applies it everywhere is either leaving units unbilled or billing units it cannot support, and which of those is happening is usually invisible until an audit.

Untimed services do not enter the calculation. Evaluations and codes billed once per session sit outside the timed total, and mixing them in is a common source of quiet overbilling.

The minutes have to exist somewhere defensible. Whichever method a payer uses, the arithmetic starts from documented treatment time. A note that records what was done without recording how long is not auditable, and rounding up to reach the next unit is the single most recoverable thing in outpatient therapy billing.

MegAligna computes units from the minutes recorded on the note under the payer’s own rule rather than one global setting, so a clinic seeing both Medicare and commercial patients is not silently applying one method to both.

The billing side has its own page: occupational therapy billing software covers unit computation and the superbill handoff, and the 8-minute rule covers the arithmetic that decides how many units a documented session is worth.