The Guide to Practice Management Software in 2024
Choosing practice management software is a key decision
Here’s how to select a software system that actually does what your practice needs
Choosing the right practice management software is a key decision, especially when starting a new practice. Practice management software is the primary interface between your staff and your patients. All of your patient records, including medical, financial, scheduling, and more, are kept in your practice management software, and it’s a key component of the medical billing process.
So how can you be sure a particular software will actually do what your practice needs?
Unlike most practitioners, our team has had the opportunity to use dozens of different practice management software systems. We’ve seen the strengths, weaknesses, and quirks of almost every software out there. Based on our experience, we’ve identified a number of criteria that will help you evaluate your own options.
Here goes:
Table of Contents
What to Expect
How to Evaluate Features and Integrations
Tiers of Practice management software
Which Practice Management software should you Choose?
What to expect
It’s very important to select the right practice management software for your practice, and especially important to make the right decision the first time. It’s usually not easy to switch systems down the line, and often very difficult to transfer data from one practice management software to another. You don’t want to deal with that hassle. Ideally, you can pick a system that will fulfill your needs, with maximum efficiency, into the future.
Most practice management software interfaces are roughly equivalent to one another, and in general there are no standouts (with a few exceptions in specific specialties - more on that below).
Your primary decision-making criteria will come down to two things:
Evaluating integrations and features
Selecting the appropriate tier of software for your own practice
How to evaluate features and integrations
User experience
Basically, you and your staff are not likely to find that a particular system is easier to use from a software perspective. None of them are significantly more intuitive, easier to understand, require fewer clicks, easier to organize, etc. They all basically do the same thing, and in general, they do it reasonably well.
Data integrations
Where you may find significant differences is in the area of integrations with other systems and other practices. Sharing data with other practitioners, with hospitals, and pulling records from patients’ other providers is one of the most important functions of practice management software. In your research, you should plan to invest a meaningful amount of time to understand what these integrations actually look like.
For example, a “data integration” between two different practice management software systems may, in some cases, consist of only a PDF file transfer. This is minimally useful to you and your staff, because while it does contain the required information, that info is not in an accessible format. In many cases, this may require you or your staff to manually enter the data from the PDF into your own system, which is a major waste of time.
A true data integration between different software systems will pull data from one system and input the data into the actual interface of the receiving system. Almost all practice management software now runs on a shared software language, known as Health Level Seven, but even so, not all systems have real data sharing capabilities.
In your research, you should talk with all practices, hospitals, and other providers with whom you expect to be sharing records and data, to find out what practice management software they use. Then, as you talk with salesmen for your practice management software, inquire about their data sharing capabilities with the specific software systems that your partner practices currently use. This research can save you immense amounts of time, effort, and expense down the road.
Patient registration, and accepting payments and copays
Self-registration kiosks are becoming standard in many practices.
One area where practice management software has advanced rapidly in the past few years is in the area of self service kiosks, which do everything from allowing patients to input all their own information, to accepting copays via credit cards.
Many of the larger practice management software companies, and even some smaller ones, have developed their own branded kiosks, which have their software pre-installed to integrate seamlessly with the patient records back end. Other companies specialize in developing and deploying custom-branded kiosk solutions for practices and hospital systems. While in many cases, this may simply be an app installed on a tablet, from both the patient’s and your staff’s perspective it still functions smoothly as an integrated system.
When it comes to accepting copays, modern software systems should integrate directly between credit card payments and patient records, so that the record automatically updates when the patient makes the payment. Cash or check payments, as well as bills mailed later, will require a bit more work on your back end.
Tiers of practice management software
In our team’s experience, we have observed four different tiers of practice management software in the market today:
Hospital-tier practice management software
Standard-tier practice management software
Specialty practice management software
Budget-tier practice management software
Most of these have potential appropriate applications in different types of practices, though we tend to caution against using the budget tier software for most practitioners.
Hospital-tier practice management software
This tier consists of two companies, Epic and Cerner. Each of these is a multi-billion dollar company, with Cerner recently becoming a subsidiary of Oracle. Each company commands a very large market share in USA hospital systems and large practices, with Epic claiming to have health records of over 50% of the USA population.
In terms of usability, both these companies have the advantage of a larger budget to maintain development and user interfaces. What’s more, since the majority of physicians use either Cerner or Epic in hospitals at some point during their residencies, most physicians have at least a passing familiarity with the software already.
In short, these two are generally considered the best practice management software options on the market.
Unfortunately, the average practice isn’t able to simply purchase practice management software from either Cerner or Epic. Both companies deal exclusively with larger clients, such as large practices and hospitals.
There is a possible workaround solution: an independent practice can work directly with the IT department of a hospital, to utilize the hospital’s instance of Cerner or Epic as a sub-licensee. However, this approach has a number of disadvantages, including:
Dependence on the hospital IT department for implementation and support
Being a low priority for IT support relative to the hospital’s internal needs
Requirement to share data with the hospital (a potential competitor)
Lack of control over your practice’s patient records
Pricing at the higher end of practice management software options
At one point, our own team explored the possibility of accessing Epic software through a license with a hospital, and we concluded there were too many difficulties and disadvantages to justify the arrangement, despite the fact that our team wanted to use the software.
Standard-tier practice management software
Today, it’s especially important for software to make patient interactions easier, and to not impede communication between your staff and patients.
A collection of mid-size companies have developed practice management software suites that serve the needs of independent practitioners and small group practices. These include Kareo, AdvancedMD, eClinicalWorks, CareCloud, and AthenaHealth, among others.
When evaluating these software solutions, it’s important to set expectations appropriately. In other words, compared to any other kind of software, you probably won’t be impressed. The user interface of practice management software tends to be far behind the cutting edge of the software industry overall. That said, all of these companies provide robust solutions that generally include all the features one would expect in 2022, including accepting co-payments, patient kiosks (see here, here, and here), as well as robust integrations with other practice management software and EHR’s.
The pricing for most of these solutions is comparable, usually in the $500-700 per month range per provider. The exception is AthenaHealth, which provides its practice management software suite for free, as long as the practice contracts with AthenaHealth for its medical billing. While this arrangement may seem attractive, especially to a startup practice with a limited budget, it’s important to scrutinize costs carefully. You don’t want to wind up in a situation down the road where your practice management software is exorbitantly expensive, while the cost and effort required to migrate to another system are prohibitive.
In general, we’ve seen that paying up front for provider licenses for these “standard-tier” software options is the best option for most practitioners. AthenaHealth’s software is good quality, but from our observations, its pricing model winds up being significantly more expensive in most cases.
Specialty practice management software
For various reasons, some of the best practice management software options from a user perspective are targeted to a few specific specialties, especially chiropractic, dermatology, podiatry, and post-acute care. It’s essentially a quirk of both the market and the demands of these specialties that has allowed their software to become more advanced: each specialty has very specific needs, as well as a reasonably large number of practitioners, which in turn has allowed software companies to develop highly effective solutions for these specialties.
Some examples of high-quality specialty practice management software include DrChrono (chiropractic), ChiroTouch (chiropractic), Modernizing Medicine (dermatology, podiatry, etc), MeDesk (various specialties), PointClickCare (post-acute), and MatrixCare (post-acute), among others. Due to the high quality user experience of these solutions, it’s fairly common for other specialties to adapt the software to their own purposes, even if it’s not directly designed for that specialty. For example, we often see orthopedists or podiatrists who use DrChrono, with some basic customization for their specific needs. Modernizing Medicine began as a dermatology EHR, but after widespread adoption by other specialties, the company is now targeting a broader range of practitioners with essentially the same software.
The pricing of these solutions is generally similar to the standard-tier software.
Budget-tier practice management software
There’s no one-size-fits-all practice management software, and different solutions will work better in different contexts.
When practice management software was first rolled out, and when the federal government first began to require EHR’s, there were a number of free options available to practitioners. At first, many of these options were reasonably good, and a practitioner could often function reasonably well with free software. Unfortunately, over time it became clear that the business model for free practice management software did not work, and the companies that provided these solutions either went out of business or started charging for their software.
The largest and best-known of these free software options is Practice Fusion, which, although no longer free, is significantly less expensive than most other software suites. Another option, focusing on primary care, is Elation Health, as well as Therapy Notes for behavioral health practitioners. All of these are under $200 per month per practitioner, and in some cases under $100 per month.
Before you decide to go with a budget tier practice management software, be sure to factor in all the potential costs of this choice. Talk to any practices or hospitals you may be working with to determine what practice management software they use, and inquire with the sales team about integrations with those systems. If the integration doesn’t actually pull in data to your own system, consider the costs of having your staff do manual data entry.
Finally, make sure the company itself is healthy and has a sustainable business. It’s not unknown for a smaller software company to cease operations, and in that case, your own practice would be forced to migrate data to a new system, at significant expense to you.
Which practice management software should you choose?
There’s no single best practice management software solution. Rather, the best solution for your own practice depends on your specific needs and use case. For most practitioners, we recommend against sub-licensing of hospital-tier software, and we also generally recommend against budget-tier software. However, in some specific instances these may be the best options.
We hope this article helps you to make a more informed decision.
If you have any questions, we’d be happy to help. You can contact us here.