Laura Del Guerra is a Registered Dietitian, Certified Diabetes Support and Education Specialist, and founder of Take Control, a Montana-based health coaching and disease management practice serving individual clients alongside employer group health plans. The practice was running on five disconnected tools: an EMR built for general medical offices, a separate scheduling tool, a standalone billing system, a secure email add-on, and Word documents for every form her team needed. None of it talked to each other, and Laura had already lived through one brutal system migration before. She wasn't eager to repeat it, but she knew something had to change.
When the frustration became too much, she and her team committed to making the most out of a two week trial with Practice Better. Four years later, Take Control runs on Practice Better as one connected system, and Laura says she has no plans to ever switch again.
Before Practice Better, Laura's team pieced together a stack of software to get the job done.
"We used a bunch of different programs to try and piecemeal something together that worked for us. We had a different EMR provider that was for medical offices like doctor's offices. We used a program for scheduling outside of that. We had to make sure we blocked those hours off the main calendar. We used a different billing program... And then we also didn't have secure email."
The fragmentation showed up as more than an inconvenience. It also affected the team’s morale.
"Employee frustration is huge as well. Unhappy employees are not as productive as happy employees, and so having to jump between system and system, accidentally making a mistake in one of the other systems, would cause a cascading effect."
When Laura finally ran the numbers on what those extra tools cost her against Practice Better's single subscription, the gap surprised her.
"I would say it was at least a savings to switch to Practice Better of five thousand dollars or more a year, just because of all the additional programs that it took, that Practice Better just does as an integration."
Laura first came across Practice Better roughly a year before she made the switch. Knowing about a better option and trusting it enough to act on it turned out to be two different things.
"Change is hard. You have something that works, but it doesn't work well, but at least you know what it is. I didn't want to settle for an EMR that was just a little bit better than what we had, because I didn't want to trade one frustration for another frustration."
Part of the hesitation was simple disbelief.
"[Practice Better] was so much different than anything I'd ever seen before. And so I wondered, could it really do what was advertised? Would it work for me like I saw in the ads?"
The rest came from an earlier migration that had gone badly. Moving onto her previous EMR had required reformatting data by hand, weeks of cleanup, and two full days of in-person training flown in from out of state.
And on top of that past experience, came the everyday excuse every practice owner recognizes:
"I know what I have works. I don't know if [a new tool] is going to meet my expectations. I'll look into it when things slow down. And the reality is things never slow down."
{{free-trial-simple-text}}
Laura committed to Practice Better's free trial the week after Christmas, when her caseload naturally slowed enough to give the platform a real test without risking client care.
"I've had enough. I'm going to do the fourteen day free trial and I'm gonna see if that works."
Laura didn't move her whole practice over at once. She started with the clients she'd be seeing over the next two weeks, then asked them to test the client portal alongside her.
"I also asked [my clients] to commit to trying the portal and logging in and having me send information, see if those reminders worked, see if we could talk to each other."
Her team even built out dummy client profiles, named after their own pets, to stress-test the system from the client's side before trusting it with real people.
"We each created fake clients with our dog's name so that we could see on the other side too, what was going on, and how well things worked and it was a lot of little different things that made us finally say, this is as good as advertised. I can trust this."
Laura went into the actual switch with a plan, not a hope.
"Hope is not a strategy. I couldn't hope that it went well. I prepared for the worst and planned for success. We worked ahead to clean our data, format it exactly as it needed to be formatted... it really did seamlessly work pretty well, with minimal massaging."
Training happened over video instead of a flight to Montana.
"We are a remote company, so we all virtually joined training, which saved us thousands of dollars in not having to all come to a certain site, hiring trainers, things like that."
What made the difference, in Laura's telling, wasn't a single big thing. It was the accumulation of a platform that didn't fight her at every step.
"Practice Better is very intuitive. I didn't have that fear of “what if I touch this button or that button, or what if I input this?” It was easy to fix and it was very intuitive to use."
A team of seven, ranging in age from mid-twenties to early sixties, all learned the new system with less friction than Laura expected, one of her own team members leading much of the training herself.
"Everybody adapted to it much easier than I thought. They gave me feedback, they gave me suggestions. It was just this constant stream of energy. They were so much less frustrated with Practice Better that it gave us a lift as a company that I wasn't expecting."
On the other side of the migration, the relief was immediate.
"There was that revelation of this is really what I hoped it would be. It was as advertised. That was this immediate relief and just this lightening of our load. Our productivity increased."
Consolidating tools also opened doors Laura hadn't been looking for. Her team now runs meal plans and recipe collections through That Clean Life, and orders labs directly through the Rupa Health integration. Both of these services are becoming additional sources of revenue for Take Control.
"There were a lot of little things that were built in that along the way we found saved us even more time or money than we were expecting and allowed us to increase our revenue."
Four years in, Laura isn't shopping for anything else.
"I am not looking to change EMRs. And I look for this to be a long term relationship. We continue to use Practice Better because of what I've seen in the four years I've used it."
Laura's advice to anyone circling their own migration decision starts by naming the fear rather than pretending it isn't there.
"Every company has to do their due diligence to decide what program is going to work best for them. But if you're not happy, if you're frustrated, if your EMR isn't serving you well, if you're using a lot of different programs to get one thing done, take a look at Practice Better. I was very, very skeptical and had to do that free trial to really sell myself, and even then I had questions. But I have not been disappointed."
Practice Better brings scheduling, charting, billing, secure client messaging, and lab ordering into one platform, so a practice like Take Control can run without patching five tools together by hand. If migration anxiety is the only thing standing between your practice and a system that actually works, a two-week trial is a low-stakes way to find out if it’s right for you.
If you're ready to grow your practice within one centralized platform, learn more about the Practice Better team plan today.
Laura Del Guerra is a Registered Dietitian, Certified Diabetes Support and Education Specialist, and founder of Take Control, a Montana-based health coaching and disease management practice serving individual clients alongside employer group health plans. The practice was running on five disconnected tools: an EMR built for general medical offices, a separate scheduling tool, a standalone billing system, a secure email add-on, and Word documents for every form her team needed. None of it talked to each other, and Laura had already lived through one brutal system migration before. She wasn't eager to repeat it, but she knew something had to change.
When the frustration became too much, she and her team committed to making the most out of a two week trial with Practice Better. Four years later, Take Control runs on Practice Better as one connected system, and Laura says she has no plans to ever switch again.
Before Practice Better, Laura's team pieced together a stack of software to get the job done.
"We used a bunch of different programs to try and piecemeal something together that worked for us. We had a different EMR provider that was for medical offices like doctor's offices. We used a program for scheduling outside of that. We had to make sure we blocked those hours off the main calendar. We used a different billing program... And then we also didn't have secure email."
The fragmentation showed up as more than an inconvenience. It also affected the team’s morale.
"Employee frustration is huge as well. Unhappy employees are not as productive as happy employees, and so having to jump between system and system, accidentally making a mistake in one of the other systems, would cause a cascading effect."
When Laura finally ran the numbers on what those extra tools cost her against Practice Better's single subscription, the gap surprised her.
"I would say it was at least a savings to switch to Practice Better of five thousand dollars or more a year, just because of all the additional programs that it took, that Practice Better just does as an integration."
Laura first came across Practice Better roughly a year before she made the switch. Knowing about a better option and trusting it enough to act on it turned out to be two different things.
"Change is hard. You have something that works, but it doesn't work well, but at least you know what it is. I didn't want to settle for an EMR that was just a little bit better than what we had, because I didn't want to trade one frustration for another frustration."
Part of the hesitation was simple disbelief.
"[Practice Better] was so much different than anything I'd ever seen before. And so I wondered, could it really do what was advertised? Would it work for me like I saw in the ads?"
The rest came from an earlier migration that had gone badly. Moving onto her previous EMR had required reformatting data by hand, weeks of cleanup, and two full days of in-person training flown in from out of state.
And on top of that past experience, came the everyday excuse every practice owner recognizes:
"I know what I have works. I don't know if [a new tool] is going to meet my expectations. I'll look into it when things slow down. And the reality is things never slow down."
{{free-trial-simple-text}}
Laura committed to Practice Better's free trial the week after Christmas, when her caseload naturally slowed enough to give the platform a real test without risking client care.
"I've had enough. I'm going to do the fourteen day free trial and I'm gonna see if that works."
Laura didn't move her whole practice over at once. She started with the clients she'd be seeing over the next two weeks, then asked them to test the client portal alongside her.
"I also asked [my clients] to commit to trying the portal and logging in and having me send information, see if those reminders worked, see if we could talk to each other."
Her team even built out dummy client profiles, named after their own pets, to stress-test the system from the client's side before trusting it with real people.
"We each created fake clients with our dog's name so that we could see on the other side too, what was going on, and how well things worked and it was a lot of little different things that made us finally say, this is as good as advertised. I can trust this."
Laura went into the actual switch with a plan, not a hope.
"Hope is not a strategy. I couldn't hope that it went well. I prepared for the worst and planned for success. We worked ahead to clean our data, format it exactly as it needed to be formatted... it really did seamlessly work pretty well, with minimal massaging."
Training happened over video instead of a flight to Montana.
"We are a remote company, so we all virtually joined training, which saved us thousands of dollars in not having to all come to a certain site, hiring trainers, things like that."
What made the difference, in Laura's telling, wasn't a single big thing. It was the accumulation of a platform that didn't fight her at every step.
"Practice Better is very intuitive. I didn't have that fear of “what if I touch this button or that button, or what if I input this?” It was easy to fix and it was very intuitive to use."
A team of seven, ranging in age from mid-twenties to early sixties, all learned the new system with less friction than Laura expected, one of her own team members leading much of the training herself.
"Everybody adapted to it much easier than I thought. They gave me feedback, they gave me suggestions. It was just this constant stream of energy. They were so much less frustrated with Practice Better that it gave us a lift as a company that I wasn't expecting."
On the other side of the migration, the relief was immediate.
"There was that revelation of this is really what I hoped it would be. It was as advertised. That was this immediate relief and just this lightening of our load. Our productivity increased."
Consolidating tools also opened doors Laura hadn't been looking for. Her team now runs meal plans and recipe collections through That Clean Life, and orders labs directly through the Rupa Health integration. Both of these services are becoming additional sources of revenue for Take Control.
"There were a lot of little things that were built in that along the way we found saved us even more time or money than we were expecting and allowed us to increase our revenue."
Four years in, Laura isn't shopping for anything else.
"I am not looking to change EMRs. And I look for this to be a long term relationship. We continue to use Practice Better because of what I've seen in the four years I've used it."
Laura's advice to anyone circling their own migration decision starts by naming the fear rather than pretending it isn't there.
"Every company has to do their due diligence to decide what program is going to work best for them. But if you're not happy, if you're frustrated, if your EMR isn't serving you well, if you're using a lot of different programs to get one thing done, take a look at Practice Better. I was very, very skeptical and had to do that free trial to really sell myself, and even then I had questions. But I have not been disappointed."
Practice Better brings scheduling, charting, billing, secure client messaging, and lab ordering into one platform, so a practice like Take Control can run without patching five tools together by hand. If migration anxiety is the only thing standing between your practice and a system that actually works, a two-week trial is a low-stakes way to find out if it’s right for you.
If you're ready to grow your practice within one centralized platform, learn more about the Practice Better team plan today.
