Luminello Review: Best Practice Management System for Solo to Medium Sized Psychiatric Practices

What is Luminello?

Luminello is a practice management system built specifically for psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and therapists. The company has a core tenant to be user-friendly, and it shows. Luminello offers all the basic functionality you need to run your practice including e-prescribing in all 50 states, scheduling, and powerful notes. It also offers valuable nice to have features including a partnership with The Carlat Report, and a public profile with built in pre-screen form. Starting at $59/month, we highly recommend Luminello to psychiatrists that want an easy-to-use, effective practice management system.

Luminello Cost

Luminello offers three different plans. If you are stuck in a long-term contract with another vendor, you can use Luminello for free until it ends:

Additional costs:

To sign up for an account, visit Luminello here.

Table of Contents

• Full Review
• Luminello Cost
• Key Features
  • Client Intake
  • Appointments & Scheduling
  • Online Patient Portal
  • Plans & Notes
  • Billing & Invoicing
  • E-Prescribing
• Luminello Alternatives & Competitors
• Is Luminello right for you?

Full Review: Luminello Mental Health EMR/EHR

Luminello is a practice management system built specifically for psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and therapists. The company was founded in 2014 by Ken Braslow and Jack Macy, a psychiatrist and a designer. Their combined backgrounds have resulted in the creation of a very user-friendly, effective tool that is a great option for private psychiatric practices. Luminello is based in San Francisco and has 7 full-time employees.

As we mentioned, Luminello has a core tenant to be user-friendly, and it shows. The system includes all the basic functionality that you need: client intake, scheduling, notes, billing, and even e-prescribing (in all 50 states!). In addition, it provides a free public profile with built in pre-screen form. On your profile, you can publicly display your business hours, general availability, insurance policies, and conditions treated. A good example of its user-friendliness are the numerous features that make using notes in Luminello simple: note cloning, automatic data population, and text shortcuts. As you will see in the images below, Luminello is highly intuitive and easy to use. As a result, many new psychiatrists are choosing to sign up for Luminello over older, more clunky systems like Valant.

We highly recommend Luminello to psychiatrists that want an easy-to-use, effective practice management system. With that said, it is important to keep in mind that this is a newer tool, and therefore is not quite as robust as other solutions. The smaller team means that the company's customer support might be less responsive than larger alternatives. If you are interested, Luminello offers a no-cost, free for life plan that is easy to test.

Key Features

Below, we'll discuss some of the key features of Luminello, and how they benefit your mental health practice. We have also included images to give you a sense of the software's design and architecture.

Client Intake

Luminello offers a pre-screening request form to help you save time onboarding new clients. Their HIPAA-compliant intake form covers the must-have clinical, scheduling, and payment information you need in order continue the screening process. After the pre-screening form is completed and you've accepted the client, you can send the client a questionnaire through the portal to continue the intake process. Data from the questionnaire will automatically populate your intake note.

Here is an example pre-screening request form, courtesy of Luminello:

Appointments & Scheduling

You can create appointments through the Luminello system, or with an online booking tool that your clients can access through their portal. You are able to enter your availability into the system to ensure that appointments can only be booked during appropriate times. Luminello offers appointment notifications and reminders for you and your clients at no extra charge. You can also link notes and payments directly to appointments. Here is what the online booking tool looks like:

Appointments can be accessed in Luminello's calendar tool. The tool can store up to 15 different calendars, which can be used for different clinicians, or to group specific types of appointments (e.g. phone appointments, in-office appointments). You can select which calendars you want to view, and they can be viewed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Here's what the calendar in Luminello looks like:

Online Patient Portal

Luminello offers a solid patient portal that has many of the key time-saving features. The portal allows you to send HIPAA complaint messages, and share e-consent forms, questionnaires, rating scales, and other documents. Patients are able to enter in demographic and billing information, see their upcoming appointments, schedule new appointments, and pay using a credit card.

This is what the patient portal looks like, image courtesy of Luminello:

Plans and Notes

Luminello comes with several pre-built EHR templates: an intake note, followup/SOAP note, free text note, a rating scale note, labs note, and a vitals note. Luminello also offers a form creation tool to premium subscribers, which allows you to create custom notes, questionnaires and administrative documents. For an additional fee, Luminello will create EHR forms for you. Finally, Luminello offers 9 assessments that you can send to patients through the portal: PHQ-9, GAD-7, MDQ, ASRS, CGI, and for CAPs, the four Vanderbilt rating scales.

Luminello has built a few time-saving features tied to its notes:

Billing and Invoicing

Luminello supports insurance billing and credit card payments. To facilitate insurance claims, Luminello parters with ApexEDI. It's important to note that ApexEDI charges $30 per month (or more) to unlock this capability. Luminello has partnered with Bluefin to store credit card information and process transactions. You can process a transaction through Luminello's charts, the client portal, or the accounts receivable report.

Here's a look at how you would charge a patient from the accounts receivable report:

E-Prescribing

Luminello designed its e-prescribing feature to be user-friendly and highly functional. Their solution allows you to send controlled substances in all 50 states and is certified by SureScripts. It also includes e-refills, a prescription interaction checker, formulary information, and the Carlat Report medication information.

To get started, all you need are your DEA & NPI numbers, your office address, phone and fax, and a mobile phone for your security token. Here's how the tool works: select the medication you want to prescribe, the dose, and enter the same information you would for a written prescription. To send the prescription, all you have to do is enter your PIN and security token. Luminello has shared that e-labs and e-prior authorization features are currently under development and will be released soon.

This is what Luminello's e-prescribing interface looks like when you are approving and sending a new patient prescription, image courtesy of the company:

Luminello Alternatives & Competitors

Luminello's primary competitors are:

Is Luminello right for you?

Luminello is a practice management system built specifically for psychiatrists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and therapists. The company has a core tenant to be user-friendly, and it shows. The company offers all the basic functionality you need to run your practice (including e-prescribing in all 50 states), and additional nice to have features including a public profile with built in pre-screen form. It is also reasonably priced at $59 per month. We highly recommend Luminello to psychiatrists that want an easy-to-use, effective practice management system. To learn more about Luminello, visit them here.