How to Start a Group Therapy Practice: What to Set Up Correctly From Day One
By Steven Van ·
Oasys says role permissions, credential-aware supervision, billing choice and payroll modelling should be set up before a group practice hires.
Group practice owners can avoid a later migration by setting up four operational systems before the practice has real headcount. Oasys Health's guide to starting a group therapy practice says licensing, space and insurance are covered well elsewhere, and focuses on what decides whether a practice can scale. Oasys Health says it provides all four from the first day a practice signs up, not as a later add-on tier.
Permissions and supervision
Many tools default every non-owner account to full access or none. That goes unnoticed with one clinician, but it matters once there is an office manager, a biller, or a second clinician who should not see the first one's caseload. Oasys defines permissions at the role level, so a new hire gets the right scope by being assigned a role.
For practices that will take on associates or provisionally licensed clinicians, the guide describes supervision modelled by credential relationship rather than a single supervised or not-supervised flag. A fully credentialed clinician is then not put through the same sign-off as a first-year intern.
Billing and payroll
- Billing: a team can run its own billing or use a fully managed service where someone else submits, tracks and reconciles claims. The guide says neither choice is wrong, and that the mistake is defaulting into one. It cites a two-person founding team that chose managed billing so it would not have to become billing specialists.
- Payroll: the guide covers splits, salaried minimums plus commission, and contractor arrangements. Software that cannot express these turns into a spreadsheet rebuilt every pay period. Practices elsewhere in the category describe about 20 hours a week of a billing manager's time going into that conversion.
Starting simple and migrating later
The guide calls migrating from a solo-first tool a real option that costs more than it looks. It says group practices that migrate typically carry eight to eleven years of records, and that failed migrations are common. Oasys also offers migration work for practices that started elsewhere.
Questions to ask a platform
- Can role-based permissions be assigned from day one, or only after a custom setup request?
- Can supervision requirements differ by credential status before the first supervisee arrives?
- Does it support both self-serve and fully managed billing?
- Can payroll reflect a real compensation structure, or does it export a flat number?
The post also mentions one group practice that started on Oasys with billing fully managed and wearable data connected from the first day.
