About FiftyMinutes

What is FiftyMinutes?

FiftyMinutes is a HIPAA-compliant EHR for private-pay psychotherapists. We see software and psychotherapy similarly: as much an art as a science, ultimately meant to help people.

FiftyMinutes is an easy-to-use system to help mental health providers save time and money. We help practices cut major costs by introducing ACH billing into a HIPAA-compliant infrastructure. ACH billing is a bank payment that costs about 1% per charge compared to credit cards, which can cost upwards of 3% per charge. Combined with an affordable subscription fee, that can add up to thousands of dollars saved a year compared to the combined costs of other EHRs. On top of that, we want to make the most painless and intuitive software we can.

What is an EHR & what is private pay?

EHR stands for electronic health record system, also known as an electronic medical record system, or EMR. It’s a software system therapists use to enter patient information, create appointments in a calendar, charge patients for sessions, write progress notes, send appointment reminders, and create and transmit superbills.

Private pay is when a therapist charges a patient for therapy directly without an intermediary such as a health insurance company. Another term for this is being charged “out of pocket.” As of now, FiftyMinutes only enables private pay transactions and does not include the option for claim submissions to be made to insurance companies.

Why the name “FiftyMinutes”?

Many therapists, if not most, tend to meet with their patients for 50-minute sessions, also known as the 50-minute hour. As a nod to the parlance of therapists, this name alludes to the specific work they do. Based on firsthand experience running a private practice, our EHR was born from ideas about how to refine the administrative and payment sides of the operation.

Our values

We hold HIPAA-compliance and the security of patient PHI as the highest value. HIPAA-compliance and security is the foundation to build a good service on. We are dedicated to never deriving our revenue from behind-the-scenes data mining via mechanisms such as tracking pixels or other covert means. We wrote more about this in Is Your Therapy EHR Discreetly Tracking Your Patients? A Privacy Guide for Modern Times.

We built FiftyMinutes for people who went into the work to be of service. We see our own service as one piece of a larger mental health ecosystem, alongside the people and institutions providing it. As a tangible expression of that, we pledge to donate 1% of our earnings to organizations in the United States that provide mental health services.

Because we know how challenging it can be to start a private practice, we want to help by offering a 180-day free trial for recent graduates, supervisees, and trainees. We also have a guide for beginning a private practice, Beginning Private Practice Part 1: 10 Administrative Steps & Tips.

Our story

When therapy moved online during the pandemic, payment methods moved with it. Paying by check had made sense when patients showed up in person; it made much less sense when the whole relationship was happening over video. Credit cards filled the gap, and paying by check became the exception rather than the rule. But credit card processing fees can run upward of 3% a transaction. That adds up fast for a private practice; it’s a cost that hadn’t really been priced into how therapists worked before.

We were aware that ACH payments could be a viable alternative for charging patients remotely at a fraction of the cost of credit cards. When incorporated into the administrative routine of therapy, ACH has many of the benefits of credit cards, such as the ability to charge remotely without the patient needing to take action. The main difference is that ACH, with patient authorization, charges directly from a patient’s bank account instead of a credit card.

We wanted to help therapists reduce their overhead by making ACH an easy-to-use option. So we began as simply an ACH payment processing app for therapists. As we spent more time refining our payment app, we added a patient profile section and a calendar, so that therapists could make recurring appointments with saved patient information and charge after each completed appointment. We added superbills and then realized we were only a few features away from an EHR. From here we expanded our service so that users could use it for all their administrative needs. Having ACH payments incorporated into an EHR meant one fewer work calendar users would need to maintain if they had a separate EHR, and opportunities to create a helpful synergy between the number of features we implemented. We wrote more about how it works in ACH Payments for Therapy Practices: The Convenience of Credit Cards at a Much Lower Fee.

Who we are

Co-founded by a licensed clinical psychologist and two software engineers, our combined experience informs our approach to creating the user experience and functionality that therapists need. We saw an opportunity to save time and money for mental health professionals, whose HIPAA-compliant services can become costly and feel clunky and poorly designed. We saw room to innovate the experience of using technology for healthcare.

We appreciate software that is elegant, intuitive, and reduces drudgery and pain points for users. We deliberate over how to minimize the number of redundant clicks users have to make while completing their regular workflow.

We love hearing from our users. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us about any questions, comments, concerns, or ideas at hello@fiftyminutes.com.