Getting started with PsyBird.

Clinicians sign up in a web browser. The iPhone app is for your clients, so a clinician account cannot sign in there; Android and any mobile browser are fine. Everything below is free until your first real client connects.

There are two Psys, and the wall between them runs one way. Your client’s companion never sees your notes or your desk. Yours is a private assistant that can see your whole practice and do most of the desk work in it, if you ask in plain English. It is on the top bar as Psy, as a tab on your phone, and as a floating panel you can drag and resize over whatever you are doing.

The one rule worth learning. Psy prepares; you tap. Asking a question gets you an answer. Asking for something to happen gets you a card showing exactly what is about to change, with a button on it. Nothing is written to a record, a calendar, a ledger or a claim until you press that button. There is a single exception, and it is worth knowing: a coverage check runs the moment you ask, because it is a live question to the payer rather than a change to anything of yours.

Brief it once, like a new associate. The gear beside Psy opens a practice guide in four parts: notes, billing, plans and general. Write how you like your notes, what your billing habits are, how you build plans. Psy reads it on every turn from then on, and you can see the exact text it reads.

What Psy does without being asked. After each client chat it writes the check-in you read on your dashboard: a summary, mood, themes and any risk flags. It drafts a letter when a conversation earned one, and that letter waits for your approval. When a new intake finishes it opens a conversation with the drafted plan in it. Once a month, if you bill insurance, it opens one conversation about the care reports waiting to be signed. And every two hours it checks with the clearinghouse for payer answers and posts what arrived.

What it will not do. Psy never moves money, never sends a claim, and never books a session without your tap. It has no web access beyond PubMed and the public NPI registry. It does not diagnose, and it does not decide what is billable: every figure it quotes is read off a row rather than worked out. If a request does not name a client and the conversation has covered more than one, it asks instead of guessing. You can pause it for a single client from their file, and your session notes stay on your side of the record.

Client billing is your own book of what your clients owe you. It has nothing to do with your PsyBird subscription, and it ships switched off. Turn it on in Settings under Client billing: set your usual session rate, which is required, and a late-cancel and no-show fee, which you can leave at zero to record missed sessions without ever charging for them.

PsyBird never backfills. Nothing from before the day you switch it on is ever charged, and once your first entry exists that start date is fixed. Turning it off later hides the billing surfaces and stops new charges, but deletes nothing.

Connect your own Stripe account. Card payments run through a Stripe account that belongs to you, connected from the Client billing page. PsyBird shows you everything it is about to send before any Stripe link exists, because Stripe locks those details permanently once the first link is minted. One of them it will not let you skip: what your clients see on their card statement. That is treated as a privacy field rather than a formatting one, because a partner or a parent on a joint account reads that statement too.

Stripe’s own hosted form then asks for the things the law requires, which PsyBird never sees: legal name, date of birth, tax number, identity documents, and the bank account you are paid into. Coming back does not mean you are finished, so PsyBird asks Stripe directly what your account can actually do, lists anything Stripe is still waiting on in plain English, and shows no card button anywhere until charges are genuinely possible.

The money is yours and it goes straight to you. Charges are made directly on your own account. PsyBird takes no fee, no commission and no percentage of anything a client pays you, and never holds the money.

Saving a card. Your client saves their card on Stripe’s own page, from a link you send yourself. PsyBird never sees a card number, and never messages a client about money. The page they land on is deliberately not a billing surface: no balance, no history, no sign-in, not even your practice name, because the link may be opened on a borrowed phone. It says the card is saved and that nothing has been charged. Links last thirty days, one live link per client, and it retires the moment a card is saved.

Everything hangs off marking a session. On the calendar, the chips are Completed, No-show and Late cancel, and the charge lands the instant you tap one. There is no nightly run. Marking a session opens a sheet that asks how it was paid, with nothing preselected: the button is grayed out and reads “Pick how it’s paid” until you choose, and only then becomes a confirm with the real amount and the client’s name in it. Two deliberate taps before any money moves.

There is no autopay. No scheduled job charges a card, and there is no automatic mode to switch on. A saved card is only ever charged when you confirm it: on the sheet a mark opens, or from their Billing tab when you decide to collect a balance later. You can also walk away: leave it on their balance and decide later.

The book behind it. Charges debit, payments and adjustments credit, and the balance is simply what is left. Money paid ahead sits as credit and settles the oldest charges first. Void and waive are kept strictly apart, because they mean different things: a void says the entry was never real, a waive says they owed it and you let it go, and a waive stays in your income records. Nothing is ever deleted; a voided row stays on the register, struck through. A card payment is refunded rather than voided, so your book and Stripe always agree, and a refund previews exactly what it will do before you confirm it.

Superbills. A private pay client can be given a superbill, which is a document they submit to their own plan for out-of-network reimbursement. It is not a claim, and PsyBird only makes one for a session that was actually paid, at the fee you actually charged.

Insurance is one switch in Settings, asked at sign-up and changeable later. Until it is on, PsyBird runs no coverage checks, builds no claims, and does not show the Claims or RTM pages at all. Turn it on and the work below becomes available; it is a per-client decision after that, so a mixed caseload is normal.

First, be claim-ready. The Insurance billing profile keeps a checklist of everything a payer needs from you: provider name, NPI, tax ID and its type, taxonomy code, the claims address split into street, city, state and ZIP, and a phone. A pill at the top reads Not claim-ready until every line is checked. Type your ten-digit NPI and one button fills most of it from the public CMS registry, leaving what you typed alone bar two things it settles, the NPI type and a five-digit ZIP it completes to ZIP+4, and tells you what it filled. ZIP+4 is not optional here: the clearinghouse wants all nine digits for the billing provider.

Set your standard fee. This is the number every insured claim bills, and it is not the client’s own rate or a sliding-scale tier. It is the single easiest thing to leave blank and regret, because with nothing on file PsyBird falls back to your default session rate from Client billing, and to the client’s own rate if you have not set that either.

Then the client’s own details. On their Billing tab, choosing Insurance opens a payer search that tells you what each payer supports before you commit. Beside it sit the fields a claim cannot go without: payer, member ID, date of birth, sex as printed on the card, address, relationship to the policy holder, the copay to collect, and at least one ICD-10 diagnosis. A client who has asked that their insurer not be told about their care gets no coverage check and no claim, ever, and there is no way around that.

Check their coverage. One tap asks the payer and reads back plan status, copay, coinsurance, deductible remaining and network status, with the date it was checked. The copay it finds is what the session sheet later offers to collect. A repeat check on the same day is answered from what it already knows, because payers do not change their answer within a day.

Enroll with the payers that need it. Most commercial and Medicare Advantage payers take claims and coverage checks from day one, and it is usually the remittance, the electronic answer carrying the money, that needs enrolling. Where enrollment is needed, the Claims page grows a card listing every payer your clients use, with three rows each, and Start enrollment is one tap. PsyBird never starts one on its own. Where a payer wants your own signature or a portal registration, the row prints their instructions and links straight to their form. That part is yours: PsyBird does not enroll you in PECOS, obtain a PTAN, or register you with a state system, though it does tell you where those happen and in what order.

While an enrollment is pending, keep marking sessions. The claim is written and parked, and when the enrollment goes live the queued claims release themselves, oldest first, each rebuilt from the record as it stands, so a diagnosis you fixed in the meantime is what actually goes out.

Filing is the same action as finishing the session. For an insured client, tapping Completed opens the session sheet, and it has three parts: the note, the copay, and the claim. The note is a hard gate, and the button reads “Add a note to complete” until one exists, whether typed, attached, drafted by Psy from a recording or the call, or explicitly kept outside PsyBird. The claim row is checked by default and names the payer, the code and the fee. One tap then runs three things in order and tells you which one it is on: completing, collecting the copay, filing. If a later step fails the earlier ones stay done, and the sheet becomes that step alone.

The codes are yours, not ours. PsyBird assembles the claim from what is already on the record: the CPT from the client’s intake, modifier 95 for video and 93 for phone, place of service 10 for telehealth and 11 otherwise, one unit, your standard fee, and the diagnoses from their billing details. It never picks, suggests or optimizes a code, and every Submit is your certification that the services were furnished as described. If something is missing it refuses and names it in plain words rather than sending a claim with a hole in it. Two sessions on one day go on one claim.

You do not have to chase any of it. Every two hours PsyBird checks with the clearinghouse on its own, matches each answer to the right claim, moves the status, appends the payer’s own words, posts the money and stamps the session. The Claims page says when it last looked. It never asks a payer for a status on demand, because that transaction is billed; it reads the free inbound stream instead, which is exactly what lets it look so often.

The client’s share is the payer’s number. There is no amount box, and a payment recorded against the share is capped at what is actually open, which is what stops an in-network client being balance-billed. The contractual write-down is never the client’s money, and a denial puts nothing on the client unless the payer’s own codes say it should. Only the stated copay is collected at the session; coinsurance and deductibles are estimates until the remittance lands, which is where refunds come from.

When something goes wrong. There are two kinds of rejection and two different fixes, and PsyBird picks the right shape itself. Stopped at the clearinghouse means the payer never saw it: fix the record, rebuild, submit. Rejected by the payer means that claim can never be re-sent, so Correct and resubmit files a new one from the record as it stands and keeps the old as evidence of what was sent. A void tells the payer a claim was sent in error, and PsyBird spells out the consequences before you send it. Some doors are shut and it says so rather than pretending: a denied claim cannot be voided, one the payer has not acknowledged has to wait, and Original Medicare takes no electronic void at all.

The clock. Every claim not yet at the payer carries a timely-filing countdown from the earliest date of service, amber at 45 days and red at 60, with a banner when something is drifting. A claim the payer already holds has no clock.

Second insurers, and money taken back. When a primary pays and leaves something unpaid, a secondary claim goes out on its own with the primary’s adjudication attached, because a secondary payer refuses a claim that does not balance. If a payer later takes a payment back, PsyBird reverses the ledger rows when their reversal actually arrives rather than guessing at it.

The monthly report is also a claim. If you are doing Remote Therapeutic Monitoring, signing the month’s care report is what files its claim, and the row above your signature names the claim and the payer so you can uncheck it for that month. The lines come off the report you signed and are never recomputed, so the paper and the claim always agree. How RTM works with PsyBird has the codes, who can bill them, and the caveats.

Filed it yourself, or got an answer on paper? Each client can be set to “I file by hand”, and Enter the payer’s answer takes what they paid, what they wrote down and the client’s share through exactly the same path an electronic remittance takes, so the numbers and the words come out identical.

The dashboard is organized by whose move it is. Letters Psy drafted are waiting for you to read, edit and send, or to hand back with guidance. Beside them sit new chats, anything flagged for attention, client inquiries and direct messages, with your schedule and a link to practice outcomes.

Chats are direct and letters are not. A client talks to Psy whenever they like; a letter about that conversation goes nowhere until you approve it. Psy only writes one when a conversation earned it, and an ordinary check-in does not.

Each client has one page: who they are and what is next, the active plan, and buttons for notes, letters, documents, billing and calibration. Below sit the week of what actually happened between sessions, the outcome charts, and the scrapbook of everything they have done. View as client shows you their side of it.

Psy takes notes in the room. In a mental health practice, Record audio sits at the right of the top bar, on today’s in-person sessions on your Home and in the calendar, and on a client’s Notes. Pick the client and Psy listens; when you stop, it drafts the note. Nothing is signed for you: you read the draft beside what was said, keep or remove any sentence Psy is not sure was said, and sign it yourself. The audio is kept only until the draft is written (three days at most), and the transcript until you sign (thirty days at most). A video session takes notes in the call; a phone session is not recorded.

If you are billing, the Client billing page carries the everyday queue as three lists, split the same way: what is waiting on you, what is waiting on the payer, and what is ready to bill because the payer has answered and set the share. The Claims page is the detail behind it.

The dividing line is deliberate and it does not move: PsyBird does the fetching, the assembling and the arithmetic, and nearly every act with a consequence waits for a person. The few that run on their own are marked in the table.

What happens	Who does it
Summarizing a client’s chat into a check-in, with mood, themes and flags	PsyBird
Drafting a letter after a conversation that earned one	PsyBird
Sending that letter to the client	You
Drafting the starter plan from a new intake	PsyBird
Making a plan the one the client follows	You
Charging a saved card	You
Building the claim, its codes and its diagnoses from the record	PsyBird
Filing the claim, which is the same tap as completing the session	You
Checking the clearinghouse for the payer’s answers, every two hours	PsyBird
Posting the payment, the write-down and the client’s share	PsyBird
Releasing claims that were queued behind an enrollment	PsyBird
Filing the secondary claim once the primary has paid	PsyBird
Correcting, voiding or appealing a claim you filed	You
Re-filing the secondary claim when a primary pays again after taking its money back	PsyBird
Signing the monthly care report, which files its claim	You

Demo and test records never bill and never produce a claim.