I built my behavioral health EHR in the middle of a nightmare.
Eleven o'clock at night. Everyone gone. Staring at a billing statement that didn't match what my team delivered that month. The money should have been there. It wasn't. And I couldn't find it.
I was running Journey to Wellness — a behavioral health center in New Jersey. I knew every client by name, cared about every outcome, and I was building something I believed in.
Then the letter came. I almost lost my license because of it.
Compliance gaps. Incomplete documentation. The kind of letter that makes your stomach drop before you've finished the first line — because you know exactly what it means. Your license. Your clients. Everything you built — suddenly at risk.
My team was not cutting corners. I was working harder than I'd ever worked in my life. I looked at every EHR on the market. Sat through every demo. And I could tell within minutes — none of them were built by someone who had actually run a facility like mine. They couldn't automate what I needed automated. They didn't know what I knew. The people building them had never spent a single night inside a behavioral health facility. Nobody told me. I just got the letter.
That was the moment I stopped looking for a better system. Because I finally understood — there wasn't one. Not one built by someone who had actually lived this work. Not one that understood behavioral health compliance from the inside. Not one that knew where the money was leaking.
So in 2011, I got so fed up I started building my own.
That year I didn't sleep — but for a completely different reason. I was building.
And when we finally deployed it —
I slept.
The compliance gaps closed. The billing matched what we delivered. The audit came — and we were ready. Not scrambling. Not hoping. Ready. My staff stopped staying late for paperwork. My best clinician stopped looking burned out. I stopped dreading Monday mornings.
Zoobook saved my business. And gave my staff and me our families back.
By 2017, my own staff was asking if their colleagues at other facilities could use it. So I said yes. And Zoobook launched.
The chaos of running a behavioral health facility isn't like a zoo. It is one.
No venture capital. No outside pressure to sell — ever.
More than twenty-five developers. Seven in sales.
That ratio tells you exactly where I put my money.
Today, 15 years later: 17 million appointments scheduled. 22 million progress notes created. 4 million claims processed. All of it running the way I designed it to run — with or without me in the building.
When behavioral health facilities make the switch, the numbers are consistent:
Revenue grew over 50% year after year. Progress notes went from 15–25 minutes to 2. Billing denials dropped. Documentation is no longer a bottleneck for growth. Billing capture went from silent leakage to 98%+ of every billable service recovered. Compliance gaps closed before regulators could find them. These are not projections. They are documented results from facilities that made the switch.
New Life Strategies case study, 2024
98% note completion rate, documentation time cut from 25 minutes to 2 minutes, from day one.
If you're reading this — you know the night I'm talking about. You don't have to keep having it. Once you stop having those nights, you never want to go back. Join me.
I am on a mission to get all facility owners to feel as good as I do about saving time and money in their business. Join me. It's life changing.
I don't measure success by software sold. I measure it by facilities that grow.
Anna Komissarenko
