CareStack Review, Pricing & Features: Best Cloud-Based Dental Practice Management Software for Group Practices

What is CareStack?

CareStack is an all-in-one, cloud-based dental practice management system that reduces the number of software subscriptions that a small dental practice needs to operate. CareStack provides small and medium dental practices with the tools and firepower they need to compete with large dental groups. CareStack's dental software comes with HIPAA-compliant, integrated modules for patient engagement, scheduling, charting, claims & billing, and business analytics.

Get a Free CareStack Demo

Table of Contents

CareStack Review Summary

CareStack was founded in 2015 by Dr. Mark Huzyak and Abhi Krishna. While practicing dentistry in Florida, Mark realized that none of the existing solutions could adequately meet his needs. So in 2015, Mark partnered with Abhi to build a cloud-based, all-in-one dental practice management system.

Today, the company is used in over 500 locations and is growing rapidly. CareStack recently signed a deal with Midwest Dental, which has over 200 offices in 16 states. In a few short years, CareStack has emerged as a leader in dental practice management, and has a great reputation for being extremely customer-focused – over half of its new features are recommendations from existing customers.

CareStack offers all the modules you need to manage your group practice in a clean, easy-to-use interface. Its HIPAA-compliant, integrated modules include patient engagement, scheduling, charting, claims & billing, and business analytics. While each of its modules is full-featured, the system includes an exceptionally powerful patient engagement tool that can be used to send very targeted, highly relevant campaigns to improve your patient engagement.

In addition, CareStack has a growing reputation for being extremely customer-centric. It states that its average customer support response time is under 30 seconds, and that over half of the new features it builds are requests from existing customers. The company is actively improving its product with new releases every 2 weeks.

The implementation with CareStack takes about 60 days. During this period, the company invests a significant amount of time creating a bespoke version of the software for each customer. The bespoke solution includes valuable custom branding, notes, scheduling, forms, documents, marketing campaigns, and more. If you prefer to partner with more modern software tools over older solutions, then CareStack is certainly worth testing.

CareStack Pricing & Cost

CareStack's software is priced per dentist, and the single cost includes all features and claims:

  • CareStack prices start around $698 per month
  • Larger practices require custom quotes from CareStack
  • You can cancel your contract at any time with a 30 day notice

Key Features

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

CareStack features:

Patient Portal

CareStack offers a full-featured patient portal that supports paperless intake, as well as the following patient actions:

  • Request and confirm appointments
  • Make and review payments
  • Print statements
  • Complete to-do lists
  • View treatment history
CareStack Patient Portal

Patient Engagement

CareStack allows you to engage your patients in a fully paperless manner starting with their first appointment and patient intake. Communications can be branded at the group and local practice levels, which is a critical feature for group practices that maintain distinct branding for each of their locations.

CareStack enables HIPAA-compliant two-way communications through email and text message. For example, to allow your patients to text to confirm appointments. You can also use recurring campaigns to send appointment reminders, notifications, and automated recalls.

When patients call your office, the tool includes a call pop that will identify the incoming caller ID and display the patient's information on your computer screen.

While in the office, patients can use the CareStack kiosk for patient check-in, to update their profile, and to access any dependent information. You can run the kiosk on any device that has Google's Chrome browser.

Finally, CareStack has powerful, advanced marketing functionality that gives you the ability to send relevant communications to specific segments of patients that result in desired patient actions. For example, you can create a customized campaign specifically targeting patients with a root canal in the next 30 days in an effort to reduce no-shows for this specific procedure.

As you'll see in the second screenshot below, you can create a marketing segment based upon many dimensions, which allows you to create very targeted, relevant communications:

  • Active and inactive patients
  • Patients in a specific age group or gender
  • Patients with specific labels
  • By upcoming, past or missed appointment date
  • Patients with specific services received in a given date range
  • Patients on a specific treatment plan
  • Patients with specific provider
  • Insurance type
  • Patients with specific dental conditions

Here's a view of CareStack's campaign builder and campaign recipient interfaces:

CareStack Campaign Builder
CareStack Campaign Recipients

Appointments & Scheduling

Appointments can be created in CareStack through the patient portal or in a few clicks from the calendar dashboard. It is simple for your team to schedule multiple providers inside a single appointment, to add a treatment plan to the appointment, and tag the right procedure or explosion codes. Your team can also book recalls during checkout.

CareStack Appointment

CareStack has a scheduling tool that can be configured to work for individual locations and your entire network. The calendar can be filtered for specific providers or teams, appointment types, locations, and specialties.

CareStack Calendar

The scheduling tool has a few advanced features:

  • A short call report for patients who would like to move to an earlier appointment time
  • The ability to see patients who were directly scheduled separately from those who requested appointments through the patient portal
  • A reschedule queue for patients who canceled or no-showed

Notes & Charting

CareStack comes with note templates that are fully customizable. They have advanced features such as:

  • Ability to mark notes that require provider acceptance
  • Smart logic that reduce denied claims by ensuring that the correct codes are used, and that the appropriate attachments are included in the file
  • Ability to automatically or manually lock notes to ensure legal compliance

The charts in CareStack include the following features:

  • A chronological summary of previous appointments with descriptions, the associated provider, notes, fees, and status
  • The ability to select different care panel types, each with up to 30 fully-customizable care panels for each type
  • The ability to see completed treatment plans, and add new treatment plans
  • Imaging through a partnership with XVWeb
CareStack Chart

Billing

CareStack supports dental & medical billing, and comes with many features to improve the efficiency of your insurance coordinators. This includes data capture pre-visit, eligibility and charge out during the patient visit, as well as claims management and reporting post-visit. CareStack has integrated with BluePay to automatically process credit card transactions.

Additionally, when you schedule new appointments, the system automatically alerts you of any potential billing issues. According to CareStack, if the system has updated fee schedules, patient eligibility, and verification forms up to date, the alerts will be about 98% accurate. For example, you will be alerted that a procedure is not eligible for the specific patient, and the specific reason will be displayed.

Here's a view of the statements interface in CareStack:

CareStack Billing

Claims

CareStack partners with DentalXChange for claims processing. Its solution provides the software, reporting, and specialized professional services you need to manage your revenue cycle. The software handles your fee schedules, provides eligibility & benefit verification, claims & denial management, ERAs & EOBs. CareStack also has a team of specialists that serve as an extension of your practice.

CareStack Claims

Business Analytics & Reports

CareStack comes with 14 analytics dashboards that are populated with data in real-time. This means you don't have to rely on dashboards with data from an hour ago or yesterday. During implementation, you can work with CareStack to customize the dashboards for your practice's KPIs.

CareStack's dashboards include:

  • Production Dashboard (example image below)
  • Collection Dashboard
  • Treatment Dashboard
  • RCM Dashboard
  • Patient Dashboard
  • New Patient Dashboard
  • Scheduling Dashboard
CareStack Production Dashboard

Reports in CareStack are interactive. You can click on data in any report to drill down into more detailed metrics. For example, in the Aging Report, you can click to view the data by provider, and then click further to see the insurance carrier breakdown for each provider. Reports can be exported into Excel files, CSVs and PDFs.

Here's the main reporting dashboard in CareStack:

CareStack Reports

CareStack Customer Support

CareStack customer support is available through chat and phone call seven days a week from 7pm to 7pm EST Monday to Friday, and 8am to 4pm Saturday and Sunday. According to the company, their response time is an extremely fast 24 seconds. For complex issues, the company has the capability to take over screens to walk you through the solution step by step.

Here's the in-product chat feature:

CareStack Customer Support

CareStack vs. Competitors

CareStack, which is fully cloud-based, does not compete directly with on-premise dental practice management solutions like Dentrix G7 and Eaglesoft. Rather, it competes most frequently with Denticon from PlanetDDS. When comparing CareStack vs. PlanetDDS, there are a few important factors to keep in mind:

  • CareStack, founded in 2015, has a more modern, easier to navigate interface compared to Denticon, which launched in 2004.
  • This also means that CareStack is a newer system, so it has not been tested in as many multi-location practices for as long.
  • Both CareStack and Denticon have partnerships with DentalXChange for claims processing, DoseSpot for e-prescribing and XVWeb for imaging.

Here are other solutions that CareStack competes with:

Is CareStack Right for You?

CareStack is an all-in-one, cloud-based dental practice management system that is ideal for dental practices with multiple locations. While the company's core customer segment is practices with 2 or more locations, CareStack works with practices ranging from a single location to hundreds of locations.

CareStack is the newest full-featured practice management system on the market. While this means that it might lack some very detailed features compared to tools that are 10-15 years older, it also means the system comes with a more intuitive user interface and modern, customer-centric approach to software development. Additionally, the company has raised over $50 million from top investors, which is a strong signal of the financial health and sustainability of the business.

It's also important to consider the benefit and cost savings of having one software system that can manage all aspects of your practice. Once implemented, CareStack can replace 3-4 disparate systems: outdated practice management systems, patient engagement systems, online booking software, and business analytics tools.

To learn more about CareStack or sign up for a free demo, visit its website today.

Bruce Hogan

Bruce Hogan is Co-founder & CEO of SoftwarePundit. He leads the team's research and publishes content about software products and trends. Bruce has experience investing at multi-billion dollar private equity firms, leading teams at venture-backed technology companies, and launching new businesses. You can connect with Bruce on LinkedIn.

Bruce is an expert in several software categories including:

  • Dental software
  • Mental health software
  • SEO software
  • Social media software