SimplePractice Review, Pricing & Features: Best Overall Practice Management System

What is SimplePractice?

SimplePractice, founded in 2012, is a best-in-class practice management system for mental health practitioners. It features one of the most user-friendly, modern interfaces on the market and has a complete set of features including Wiley Practice Planners, EHRs, telehealth, and robust mobile applications. Starting at $39 per month for a single clinician, SimplePractice is a reasonably priced high-quality option for solo to medium-sized practices.

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Table of Contents

• What is SimplePractice?
• Full Review
• SimplePractice Pricing & Cost
• SimplePractice Features
  • Client Intake
  • Scheduling
  • Client Portal
  • Plans & Notes
  • Billing & Invoicing
  • SimplePractice Telehealth
  • Professional Website
  • Monarch
• SimplePractice vs. Competitors
• Is SimplePractice Right For You?

Full Review: SimplePractice

SimplePractice was started in 2012 by CEO Howard Spector while he was training to become a therapist. Today, the company has over 90,000 customers across many fields, including therapists, psychologists, social workers, counselors, speech-language therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, dietitians, and substance-abuse counselors. The company's mission is to empower its customers to run their private practices more efficiently, and it appears that it is succeeding.

SimplePractice is a HIPAA-compliant, modern system with a wide range of basic and advanced features that solo to medium-sized practices use to manage their day-to-day operations. Its software is well designed, and flows more intuitively than many other products on the market. Below, we'll walk you through the core product components including client intake, scheduling, billing as well as SimplePractice's treatment plans and notes.

In addition these core features, SimplePractice offers advanced features like HIPAA-compliant telehealth, a robust client portal, and highly-rated Apple and Android mobile applications. SimplePractice also offers an impressive variety of options for plans & notes – Wiley Planners, pre-built templates for numerous professions, and a tool to create forms from scratch.

SimplePractice has grown rapidly by offering a rich set of features in a product that is intuitive and easy to navigate. We highly recommend SimplePractice for solo to medium-sized practices in the market for a new system.

SimplePractice Pricing & Cost

SimplePractice pricing starts at $39 per month (30-day free trial) for a single clinician. Group plans start at $99 per month. Additional costs include:

Cancellation: The service is month-to-month, and you can cancel any time.

SimplePractice Features

Below, we'll discuss the key features of SimplePractice, and how they would benefit your behavioral health practice. We'll also share some photos of the actual product to give you a sense of its design and architecture.

SimplePractice Features:

Client Intake

SimplePractice has a very strong client intake solution. It's clear that the team at SimplePractice has thought about the end-to-end client intake flow and has built a solution that intuitively guides you through each step. Some other systems have the same functionality, but each step is more manual and time-intensive.

To add a client to SimplePractice, you enter their name, contact information, billing type and referral source. Once created, SimplePractice prompts you to send a personalized email to the client with intake instructions, and attach your desired paperless intake documents. Through the client portal, you can share consent documents, questionnaires, and demographic and credit card information. The client will receive your email with a link to the client portal and log-in instructions. Once logged in, he or she can complete your paperless intake forms.

The SimplePractice tool you use to create your client welcome email is below. On the right side of the screen, you can see the available documents you can seamlessly share with the patient through the client portal:

Scheduling

SimplePratice has a clean, user-friendly calendar that displays your team's appointments and events. From this view, you can click any appointment to view its time, location, service type, billing type and total cost. The calendar can be filtered by clinician, and each appointment has a link you can use to start telehealth appointments. Finally, the calendar can be easily synced with iCal, Google Calendar and Outlook; however, this 2-way sync only imports 3 months of data.

On the patient side, clients can see your team's availability and schedule appointments through the client portal. A great perk is that unlike other tools, email, SMS and voice appointment reminders all come at no extra charge. Another unique SimplePractice feature is the Booking Widget, which you can embed on any website. Here is an example booking widget provided courtesy of SimplePractice:

SimplePractice Client Portal

In SimplePractice's client portal, your clients can complete intake forms, request appointments, send HIPAA-compliant messages, download documents, and pay bills. When a client is added to the system, they receive a customized email that includes a link to your portal and their log-in information. Clients can add all their contact information, demographic information, and billing information. They are also able to see recent invoices, statements and account activity over any specific date range. Finally, patients can join Telehealth sessions directly from the portal if they prefer it to the SimplePractice mobile app.

Here is an example of how a patient would sign a psychotherapy consent form using the portal:

SimplePractice also recently built the functionality for clients to be able to upload their own documents into the portal. Examples of documents that can be uploaded include: insurance cards, completed intake paperwork, and doctor’s referrals. The portal handles the following file types: PDF, DOC/X, CSV, JPG, PNG, MP3 and M4A formats.

Plans and Notes

SimplePractice comes with both templates and the ability to create your own custom forms. A new feature in the system is the integration of Wiley Practice Planners. You can now choose from over 1,000 pre-written treatment goals, objectives, and interventions for the most common problems. One benefit is that these plans perform strongly under insurance audits.

You can create custom forms from scratch or from existing templates. When creating from scratch, you can add long-answer, short-answer, single choice, multiple choice, drop-down and date fields. You can also add section headers, section breaks and paragraph copy. The template library has templates for many professions, including behavioral health therapists, dietitians, chiropractors, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and substance abuse counselors.

Here is a customizable template for a basic SOAP note, followed by a more advanced progress note:

Billing and Invoicing

SimplePractice's Smart Billing System was designed specifically for behavioral health providers. They partner with Stripe for credit card processing and the secure storage of credit card information. You can sign up to accept credit cards using the Online Payments section of application in less than five minutes. Credit card transactions have a fee of 2.95% + 30¢, with no fees for refunds.

To promote operational efficiency, SimplePractice allows you to create and save your practice's services with descriptions, rates, length of time, and the corresponding clinicians. The system allows you to use these services while creating and filing insurance claims. SimplePractice provides an option to automatically generate invoices on a daily or monthly basis, and a batch claim feature to further streamline your processes. Both can help increase billed revenue.

SimplePractice Telehealth

SimplePractice telehealth costs an additional $10 per clinician per month. It is a HIPAA compliant telehealth solution used by over 3,000 health and wellness professionals each day.

Telehealth is integrated directly into the system – you can launch a video appointment directly from the calendar with one click. It functions on any device and does not require patients to use a log-in or password to get started. The company also recently launched a mobile app specifically for Telehealth. Patients can download the app and join the appointment using only a URL. It is important to note that many of SimplePratice's competitors do not offer a reliable telehealth solution.

For a deep-dive on SimplePractice Telehealth, read our SimplePractice Telehealth Overview.

Professional Website

SimplePractice recently released a website builder that allows its customers to build simple, professional websites. This product costs an additional $15 per month.

The website editor is very simple to use and requires no knowledge of website development. You create your website by entering your practice information, picking a design theme, and editing each section. There are a handful of options such as the ability to include testimonials, add social media contact information, and optimize your page title and description for SEO.

Patients can book appointments and access your client portal directly from the website. Here's a live example of website that was created using SimplePractice.

Monarch

In March 2021, SimplePractice launched Monarch, an online directory that connects behavioral health therapists and counselors with patients. All SimplePractice customers can create a listing in Monarch for free through the end of 2021. SimplePractice has an entire team dedicated to Monarch, which will help this channel becoming a meaningful growth driver for SimplePractice customers.

For more information, read our overview of Monarch by SimplePractice.

SimplePractice vs. Competitors

SimplePractice's primary competitors are:

We've analyzed SimplePractice compared to its top competitors. Read these in-depth analyses that evaluate SimplePractice's cost, features and ease of use compared to alternatives:

Is SimplePractice Right For You?

SimplePractice is one of the best solutions on the market. We strongly recommend it for solo, medium and group practices.

It's most important strengths include a streamlined client intake workflow, a wide range of options for forms, easy-to-use telehealth appointments, and a mobile app with impressive feature parity. There are a few smaller features that SimplePractice doesn't include, such as the ability to bulk-add clients and ePrescribing, but these are easily outweighed by the software company's strengths.

If you are interested in testing SimplePractice's software for your practice, sign up for a free 30-day trial today.

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