Streamlining Admissions and Reclaiming Clinical Time

NOW Counseling is a community-based behavioral health organization specializing in substance use and addiction treatment across southwestern Indiana. NOW provides a full continuum of care from residential treatment through sober living, maintaining a mission-driven, client-first approach.

• 3 outpatient clinic locations
• 2 residential facilities
• 14 sober living homes (100 beds)
• ~70 employees across 3 counties in southwestern Indiana
• 10 years in operation

• Residential treatment
• Partial hospitalization (PHP)
• Intensive outpatient (IOP)
• Individual and group therapy
• Transitional and sober living housing

Overview

New Opportunities for Wellness (NOW) Counseling was founded to meet a critical need: timely, high-quality substance use and behavioral health treatment in southwestern Indiana. Over ten years, what started as a small outpatient operation has grown into a multi-site organization offering residential treatment, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, sober living, and a full spectrum of supportive services across three counties.

As NOW expanded from basic outpatient services into residential care, PHP, and transitional housing, the organization outgrew its early EHR systems. Those platforms served their purpose during the initial shift from paper to digital, but they weren't built for the kind of complexity NOW was taking on. Workflows that worked fine at a smaller scale started to feel clunky, reporting couldn't keep pace with what leadership needed to see, and the team was spending too much time working around the system instead of in it.

In 2022, NOW took the opportunity to consolidate their tech stack under Ease’s all in one platform. The organization chose Ease for its user-friendly documentation workflows, customizable templates, and flexibility to tailor the system to practice-specific addiction treatment requirements.

Today, Ease supports NOW’s clinicians and administrative teams across every level of care, helping the organization serve more clients without sacrificing documentation quality, billing timeliness, or staff satisfaction, even as it prepares to double its residential bed capacity this year.

• Reduced group therapy note documentation time by at least 50%
• Saved clinicians an estimated 2–3 hours of administrative time per week
• Reduced documentation errors through customizable dropdown and checkbox workflows
• Supported timely claim submission and improved cash flow by streamlining documentation compliance
• Delivered prompt, reliable support to keep operations running smoothly.

Simplifying documentation to improve clinician satisfaction and reduce errors

NOW prides itself on providing care for clients the day they walk in the door. To ensure timely treatment, documentation speed and accuracy are essential. Before Ease, NOW’s prior systems relied heavily on large open text boxes, requiring lengthy narrative entries. This created two problems: it was time-consuming for clinicians, and it increased the likelihood of errors, especially for newer therapists still learning the ropes.

Ease’s customizable documentation interface enabled NOW to set up templates that reflected how they actually worked, tailored to their treatment approach and the complex payer requirements of Indiana Medicaid. Instead of free text, administrators could streamline the documentation process by allowing users to check checkboxes or select options from a dropdown. This enabled clinicians to complete documentation faster and with fewer mistakes, and reduced the supervisory burden of reviewing and correcting notes after the fact.

“The format they have is a lot of dropdowns, a lot of checkboxes. Just a more user-friendly interface — specifically for new staff. It increases their job satisfaction. It also increases their supervisor’s job satisfaction because it’s less stuff that they’re going behind them and catching and fixing.” — Jordan, Owner, NOW Counseling

The results have been significant. Intake documentation time dropped by 50%, from roughly two hours to about one hour. Group therapy notes, previously requiring individual documentation for each participant, can now be completed with a shared group note plus individual responses, cutting that workflow by at least half as well.

Across the organization, Jordan estimates that clinicians save two to three hours per week on administrative tasks. For a team that prioritizes getting clients into care the same day they walk through the door, that time is reinvested directly in patient-facing work.

Connecting documentation to billing to protect cash flow

NOW employs over 70 people across three counties, so maintaining strong cash flow to make payroll is critical. When documentation is late or contains errors, it delays claim submission, which delays payment. At NOW’s scale, even small disruptions ripple through the entire operation.

“The services don’t get billed until the documentation gets done. The simpler we can make those processes, the fewer errors we have. And I think that’s probably what I’ve seen the most of working with Ease: the reduction of errors.” — Jordan, Owner, NOW Counseling

With Ease, NOW has seen fewer clinicians falling out of compliance with documentation timelines. Notes are getting completed and locked on time, which means prior authorizations are submitted promptly, and claims go out without unnecessary delays.

NOW works with a third-party billing and credentialing partner, MedPro, which communicates directly with Ease to resolve any integration issues. Jordan values this collaborative dynamic: when a billing delay surfaced a few months ago due to how claims were being pushed through, the Ease and MedPro teams worked together to resolve it quickly.

By reducing documentation errors and keeping the clinical-to-billing pipeline moving, Ease helps NOW maintain the steady cash flow required to sustain operations, meet payroll, and fund continued growth.

Responsive support that keeps workflows moving

As NOW grows, new use cases for Ease emerge, and changes to workflows and processes are needed. Ease’s expert support team helps Jordan and his staff think through, test, implement, and support platform customizations and changes as they evolve.

“For me, it’s the communication. If I have an issue I’m thinking through and I can get it to the right person and they can help me in a relatively timely manner — that’s what’s huge to me.” — Jordan, Owner, NOW Counseling

This responsiveness has been a meaningful differentiator for Ease. Whether it’s a workflow adjustment or a billing integration question, Jordan’s team can see requests addressed without the delays or runaround common with other vendors.

After switching to Ease, EHR-related complaints have decreased substantially. The combination of a user-friendly interface and responsive support has helped Ease become a stable part of NOW’s daily operations rather than a source of friction.

Scaling care without compromising what matters

NOW Counseling is entering a pivotal year. A new facility is set to open that will double residential bed capacity, consolidating two separate gender-specific locations into one larger campus. Growth across outpatient, PHP, and sober living services continues as well.

For Jordan, the role of an EHR in supporting that growth is straightforward: streamlined documentation means more time invested in care and more consistent cash flows. That cycle is what keeps the organization running and growing.

“It's simpler for them to complete their documentation — things are getting locked timely, approved timely, billed and paid out timely.” — Jordan, Owner, NOW Counseling

As NOW continues to scale its impact across southwestern Indiana, Ease ensures that growth doesn’t come at the expense of documentation quality, staff satisfaction, or the speed at which people in crisis can access care. In a community where someone can walk through the door and see a therapist that same day, every minute saved on the back end matters.