How Kat O’Donnell built a full caseload without spending client time on admin.
Kat O’Donnell is an LCSW who focuses on autistic and ADHD clients through her practice, Wingspan Neuro-Affirming Care. She runs it part-time, around a full-time job, and Carepatron is the first EMR she has owned. She trialed several platforms first, judging each on something most comparisons leave out: whether her clients could find their way around it without effort. Templates now carry the admin of running a business. She has been booked out since she opened, “in large part thanks to not needing to use any of my client time for admin work.”
Meet Kat O’Donnell
Kat is a licensed clinical social worker. Before Wingspan, she worked as a hospital therapist, which meant using whatever EMR the hospital had chosen. When she opened her own practice she had spreadsheets and no system of her own. So she went looking, and she wasn’t shopping for a feature list. She was testing platforms against her own head and her clients’ heads at the same time. “I chose Carepatron after trialing a few different platforms. I found this system to be the most intuitive, especially to my neurodivergent brain.” That test narrowed things quickly. A platform that took effort to learn was a platform that would keep taking effort, every week, out of the same attention her clients needed.An EMR her clients can navigate
Wingspan is built around autistic and ADHD clients, and that focus changes what the software has to do. The client-facing side of an EMR, the booking, the forms, the paperwork, isn’t a neutral wrapper around the care. For her clients it’s part of the experience, and a confusing one works against everything the session is for. “My priority, only serving autistic and/or ADHD clients, is to have as positive of an EMR experience as possible, so clients feel they can easily navigate the system. Carepatron provided this, and at a much more affordable rate for me as a business owner.” The cost sat alongside it as the other half of the decision, and for a practice that hadn’t opened yet, it wasn’t a small half.Templates are what make a part-time practice possible.
A part-time practice has no slack in it. The hours Kat has are the hours she sees clients in, which means the administrative work of running a business has to happen somewhere else, on top of a full-time job. Templates are what stop that from becoming unmanageable. “Creating streamlined templates in Carepatron has allowed for me to automate so many of my processes in a way that allows me to work part-time as a therapist, while still holding a full time job, without burning myself out from all of the administrative work of owning a business!” Then the part she names as the result. “I have been completely booked with clients (every session slot!) since opening, in large part thanks to not needing to use any of my client time for admin work.”What made the difference was reaching a person.
Kat set up her first EMR herself, around a full-time job. Questions were always going to come up, what mattered was how quickly she could reach someone who could answer them. “What made the most of a difference in choosing Carepatron was the ability to talk to real people whenever I needed support. The responses were incredibly timely, and it allowed me to establish my EMR with ease, which was vital as a new business owner!” Her advice to other therapists weighing it up is the same test she ran on herself. “I would recommend they trial it for themself and see what resonates for them. I feel confident the platform would!”