Theramanager

Maestro Med or MaestroMed (which used to be Theramanager) was a very good program years ago. Over time the designers added more and more features, which sounds like a good thing. Unfortunately, the program has gradually become buggy and unstable. Error messages come up all the time with regular use, some of which can close or freeze the program. I have repeatedly experienced actual loss of patient medical records when the program freezes. It has not happened to billing or scheduling, fortunately. Unfortunately, now and then I see a corrupted patient note I hadn’t noticed before (just a bunch of rectangles and random characters instead of letters and words), and there’s nothing I can do about it unless I get lucky and find an old (months old!) backup from before the corruption. That’s pretty bad. To be fair, there are some time saving features specific to psychology and psychiatry that you don’t always see in general EMR programs, but the many hours wasted with customer service on fixing frequent problems much more than offsets the time saved.

The customer service is often fine but has major flaws. The head of the company is clearly very smart, but even he can’t fix some of the problems, and both he and some of his employees can be way too casual when a major problem comes up. He doesn’t always answer his emails, and it can take days before a major problem is resolved… IF it’s resolved. A lot of the time you have to figure it out on your own.

The program is fairly inexpensive, but I don’t think it’s worth the savings at all. I recommend spending more and getting something better, or going for one of the free programs out there. Once you choose a medical record keeping program, it’s hard to switch without many hours of disruption to your practice, so I’m stuck working with a really bad program and a lack of customer support. I’m writing this hoping that others don’t end up in my situation.