The best EHR for a private practice is the one built for your kind of care. Practice Better describes itself as an EHR built for allied health professionals such as dietitians, nutritionists, naturopathic doctors, and health coaches, while TherapyNotes is purpose-built for behavioral health professionals and Tebra serves primary care physicians, specialists, and group practices. Answer three questions about your practice first: how you get paid, whether your care continues between sessions, and whether you work alone or with a team.
Key takeaways
An EHR, or electronic health record, holds a client's clinical record in a form built to be shared across providers. Practice Better's guide to EMR vs. EHR describes an EMR as the digital version of a paper chart in one practitioner's office, and an EHR as a record "designed to work across healthcare providers and empower patients in the process."
A private practice EHR can also be the system you run the business on. Practice Better, for example, puts scheduling, charting, billing and insurance, telehealth, and a client portal in one platform. If your EHR works this way, choosing it means choosing your chart and your front desk at the same time.
Before you open a single feature list, answer three questions about your own practice. Your answers decide which features matter.
Write down the share of your sessions that insurance pays for, and the share your clients pay out of pocket.
If insurance pays for your sessions, you need eligibility checks, claim submission, and a way to track rejections, all inside the chart. Practice Better's billing and insurance tools check eligibility, submit claims, track status, and manage rejections through its Claim.MD integration for U.S. customers, and connect to Office Ally and more than 5,000 payers with CMS-1500 exports.
If your clients pay out of pocket, put payment flexibility first. Practice Better supports deposits at booking, payment plans with scheduled installments, sliding-scale pricing, HSA and FSA cards, and invoices in different currencies, per its billing page.
If you run both, test both workflows during the trial by running a real claim and a real package sale.
Picture a normal week. In one pattern, you see a client, write the note, and book the next visit. In the other, you also send a meal plan, review a food journal, adjust a supplement protocol, and run a group program between visits.
If your work looks like the second pattern, the client side of the EHR carries as much weight as the clinical side. Practice Better's client portal gives clients secure messaging, online booking, intake forms, protocols, and programs in one place, with a food database of more than 600,000 foods and wearable sync with Apple Health, Fitbit, Garmin Connect, and Oura.
If your work looks like the first pattern, weigh documentation depth and billing speed instead. A portal your clients open once a month is a smaller part of the decision.
A solo practice needs one login that handles everything. A group practice needs shared calendars, shared resources, permissions, and pricing that scales with headcount.
Practice Better's Team plan starts at $155 a month with two practitioner licenses and unlimited admin licenses, and adds practitioners at $50 per user per month up to 200. It includes a unified team calendar and shared intake forms, protocols, and client files. If you plan to hire in the next few years, ask every vendor what happens to your bill when you add your second and fifth practitioner.
Use this table to build a shortlist. The "built for" column uses each platform's own positioning, the audience Practice Better's comparison pages describe, or, for SimplePractice, Practice Better's description of it as built primarily around mental health and insurance-based billing workflows, so read it as a starting point and confirm it during a trial.
| Your practice | Put first on your checklist | Platforms built for it |
|---|---|---|
| Nutrition, dietetics, functional medicine, naturopathic, or health coaching | Care between sessions: protocols, journals, meal plans, programs | Practice Better |
| Therapy or behavioral health that bills insurance | Structured therapy notes and insurance-first workflows | TherapyNotes, SimplePractice, Practice Better |
| Primary care or a specialist medical practice | Revenue cycle management and medical billing | Tebra |
| Multi-disciplinary clinic (massage, chiropractic, physiotherapy, acupuncture) | Multi-practitioner scheduling and clinic reception | Jane |
| Group wellness practice | Shared resources, team calendar, per-practitioner pricing | Practice Better (Team plan) |
Each entry below names who the platform is built for and links to Practice Better's side-by-side comparison, so you can check the details against your own practice.
Practice Better calls itself an EHR built for allied health professionals across specialties, including dietitians, nutritionists, health coaches, and naturopathic doctors. Its telehealth page adds functional medicine practitioners and other wellness professionals, and its therapist page covers mental health professionals.
What it includes:
Paid plans start at $35 a month billed monthly, or $25 a month billed annually, on the Starter plan, per Practice Better's pricing page.
SimplePractice describes its product as "EHR software for health & wellness professionals" on its homepage. See Practice Better vs. SimplePractice for a side-by-side view.
Practice Better's comparison describes TherapyNotes as purpose-built for behavioral health professionals: therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors running insurance-heavy practices. The same page lists SOAP, DAP, and BIRP note templates, outcome measures, and documentation compliance tools built around the therapy workflow. See Practice Better vs. TherapyNotes for the full comparison.
If you shopped for an EHR a few years ago, you saw Kareo. Practice Better's comparison notes that Tebra was formed from the Kareo and PatientPop merger in November 2021, and describes it as serving primary care physicians, specialists, and group practices, with revenue cycle management, real-time insurance eligibility verification, and automated claim scrubbing. See Practice Better vs. Tebra for the side-by-side.
Practice Better's comparison describes Jane as a Canadian-based, multi-disciplinary clinic system serving massage therapists, chiropractors, physical therapists, acupuncturists, and mental health counselors, with multi-practitioner scheduling, SOAP notes, insurance claim management, and clinic reception tools. See Practice Better vs. Jane for more.
For the full list of side-by-side pages, including Healthie, Practice Fusion, CharmHealth, and OptiMantra, visit Practice Better's compare hub.
If you run a nutrition, functional medicine, health coaching, or integrative practice, and a large share of your work happens between appointments, your checklist looks different from a therapy or medical practice's.
Run these checks on every platform on your shortlist:
For a deeper look at why general medical EHRs struggle with this kind of care, read why a generic EHR falls short for alternative medicine. For specialty guides, see how to choose a functional medicine EMR and how to choose an EHR for a naturopathic practice.
Epic is built for hospitals and health systems, and its setup, pricing, and staffing needs are designed for organizations with their own IT departments. The same applies to the other hospital EHRs that come up when people search for the leading systems, such as Oracle Health and MEDITECH.
A solo nutritionist, a three-person functional medicine clinic, and a group therapy practice shop in a different market. Compare your options against platforms built for private practice, such as the ones above.
A free trial lets you see how an EHR handles your own week. Practice Better offers a 14-day free trial on paid plans and 30 days on the Team plan. Bring real tasks to every trial on your shortlist:
If you run a group practice, add one more task: give a second practitioner a login and check what they can and cannot see.
Ready to run these tasks on your own practice? Start a free trial of Practice Better.
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Practice Better fits private practices where care continues between sessions: nutrition, dietetics, functional medicine, naturopathic medicine, health coaching, and therapists who want client engagement tools alongside their notes. It covers solo practitioners through the free Sprout plan for students and recent grads with up to three clients, per the pricing page, and group practices through the Team plan.
Practice Better is built around longitudinal wellness care. A large medical group running high-volume, insurance-first episodic care is solving a different problem, and a platform built around revenue cycle management, such as Tebra, matches that model more closely. Practice Better does support multi-provider teams. The question to answer is whether your care model is episodic or continuing.
The best EHR for an independent practice is the one built for its type of care and payment model. Wellness practices with care between sessions fit Practice Better, behavioral health practices billing insurance fit platforms like TherapyNotes, and medical practices focused on revenue cycle management fit platforms like Tebra.
The names that come up for this question are hospital systems, such as Epic, Oracle Health, and MEDITECH. Those run large hospital networks. Independent practices compare a different set of platforms built for their size, such as Practice Better, SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, Tebra, and Jane.
Practice Better offers a free Sprout plan for students and recent grads to use with up to three clients, and a Starter plan for practitioners working with more than three clients, per its pricing page.
Yes. Practice Better checks eligibility, submits claims, tracks status, and manages rejections through its Claim.MD integration for U.S. customers. Without a Claim.MD account, you can still create and export CMS-1500 claims and send superbills to clients, per the billing page.
Yes. Practice Better meets HIPAA, GDPR, PIPEDA, and PHIPA standards on every plan, encrypts client data end to end, and makes a Business Associate Agreement available, per the Team plan page.
Yes. Practice Better's Migration Concierge Service helps import your client files from your current software and includes one-on-one guidance for account setup, per the pricing page. Read the guide to switching your EHR for the full process.
Take your answers to the three questions above, your real intake form, and one real client workflow into a trial. Start a free trial of Practice Better and run your week on it before you decide.
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The best EHR for a private practice is the one built for your kind of care. Practice Better describes itself as an EHR built for allied health professionals such as dietitians, nutritionists, naturopathic doctors, and health coaches, while TherapyNotes is purpose-built for behavioral health professionals and Tebra serves primary care physicians, specialists, and group practices. Answer three questions about your practice first: how you get paid, whether your care continues between sessions, and whether you work alone or with a team.
Key takeaways
An EHR, or electronic health record, holds a client's clinical record in a form built to be shared across providers. Practice Better's guide to EMR vs. EHR describes an EMR as the digital version of a paper chart in one practitioner's office, and an EHR as a record "designed to work across healthcare providers and empower patients in the process."
A private practice EHR can also be the system you run the business on. Practice Better, for example, puts scheduling, charting, billing and insurance, telehealth, and a client portal in one platform. If your EHR works this way, choosing it means choosing your chart and your front desk at the same time.
Before you open a single feature list, answer three questions about your own practice. Your answers decide which features matter.
Write down the share of your sessions that insurance pays for, and the share your clients pay out of pocket.
If insurance pays for your sessions, you need eligibility checks, claim submission, and a way to track rejections, all inside the chart. Practice Better's billing and insurance tools check eligibility, submit claims, track status, and manage rejections through its Claim.MD integration for U.S. customers, and connect to Office Ally and more than 5,000 payers with CMS-1500 exports.
If your clients pay out of pocket, put payment flexibility first. Practice Better supports deposits at booking, payment plans with scheduled installments, sliding-scale pricing, HSA and FSA cards, and invoices in different currencies, per its billing page.
If you run both, test both workflows during the trial by running a real claim and a real package sale.
Picture a normal week. In one pattern, you see a client, write the note, and book the next visit. In the other, you also send a meal plan, review a food journal, adjust a supplement protocol, and run a group program between visits.
If your work looks like the second pattern, the client side of the EHR carries as much weight as the clinical side. Practice Better's client portal gives clients secure messaging, online booking, intake forms, protocols, and programs in one place, with a food database of more than 600,000 foods and wearable sync with Apple Health, Fitbit, Garmin Connect, and Oura.
If your work looks like the first pattern, weigh documentation depth and billing speed instead. A portal your clients open once a month is a smaller part of the decision.
A solo practice needs one login that handles everything. A group practice needs shared calendars, shared resources, permissions, and pricing that scales with headcount.
Practice Better's Team plan starts at $155 a month with two practitioner licenses and unlimited admin licenses, and adds practitioners at $50 per user per month up to 200. It includes a unified team calendar and shared intake forms, protocols, and client files. If you plan to hire in the next few years, ask every vendor what happens to your bill when you add your second and fifth practitioner.
Use this table to build a shortlist. The "built for" column uses each platform's own positioning, the audience Practice Better's comparison pages describe, or, for SimplePractice, Practice Better's description of it as built primarily around mental health and insurance-based billing workflows, so read it as a starting point and confirm it during a trial.
| Your practice | Put first on your checklist | Platforms built for it |
|---|---|---|
| Nutrition, dietetics, functional medicine, naturopathic, or health coaching | Care between sessions: protocols, journals, meal plans, programs | Practice Better |
| Therapy or behavioral health that bills insurance | Structured therapy notes and insurance-first workflows | TherapyNotes, SimplePractice, Practice Better |
| Primary care or a specialist medical practice | Revenue cycle management and medical billing | Tebra |
| Multi-disciplinary clinic (massage, chiropractic, physiotherapy, acupuncture) | Multi-practitioner scheduling and clinic reception | Jane |
| Group wellness practice | Shared resources, team calendar, per-practitioner pricing | Practice Better (Team plan) |
Each entry below names who the platform is built for and links to Practice Better's side-by-side comparison, so you can check the details against your own practice.
Practice Better calls itself an EHR built for allied health professionals across specialties, including dietitians, nutritionists, health coaches, and naturopathic doctors. Its telehealth page adds functional medicine practitioners and other wellness professionals, and its therapist page covers mental health professionals.
What it includes:
Paid plans start at $35 a month billed monthly, or $25 a month billed annually, on the Starter plan, per Practice Better's pricing page.
SimplePractice describes its product as "EHR software for health & wellness professionals" on its homepage. See Practice Better vs. SimplePractice for a side-by-side view.
Practice Better's comparison describes TherapyNotes as purpose-built for behavioral health professionals: therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors running insurance-heavy practices. The same page lists SOAP, DAP, and BIRP note templates, outcome measures, and documentation compliance tools built around the therapy workflow. See Practice Better vs. TherapyNotes for the full comparison.
If you shopped for an EHR a few years ago, you saw Kareo. Practice Better's comparison notes that Tebra was formed from the Kareo and PatientPop merger in November 2021, and describes it as serving primary care physicians, specialists, and group practices, with revenue cycle management, real-time insurance eligibility verification, and automated claim scrubbing. See Practice Better vs. Tebra for the side-by-side.
Practice Better's comparison describes Jane as a Canadian-based, multi-disciplinary clinic system serving massage therapists, chiropractors, physical therapists, acupuncturists, and mental health counselors, with multi-practitioner scheduling, SOAP notes, insurance claim management, and clinic reception tools. See Practice Better vs. Jane for more.
For the full list of side-by-side pages, including Healthie, Practice Fusion, CharmHealth, and OptiMantra, visit Practice Better's compare hub.
If you run a nutrition, functional medicine, health coaching, or integrative practice, and a large share of your work happens between appointments, your checklist looks different from a therapy or medical practice's.
Run these checks on every platform on your shortlist:
For a deeper look at why general medical EHRs struggle with this kind of care, read why a generic EHR falls short for alternative medicine. For specialty guides, see how to choose a functional medicine EMR and how to choose an EHR for a naturopathic practice.
Epic is built for hospitals and health systems, and its setup, pricing, and staffing needs are designed for organizations with their own IT departments. The same applies to the other hospital EHRs that come up when people search for the leading systems, such as Oracle Health and MEDITECH.
A solo nutritionist, a three-person functional medicine clinic, and a group therapy practice shop in a different market. Compare your options against platforms built for private practice, such as the ones above.
A free trial lets you see how an EHR handles your own week. Practice Better offers a 14-day free trial on paid plans and 30 days on the Team plan. Bring real tasks to every trial on your shortlist:
If you run a group practice, add one more task: give a second practitioner a login and check what they can and cannot see.
Ready to run these tasks on your own practice? Start a free trial of Practice Better.
{{general-demo-center-simple-text}}
Practice Better fits private practices where care continues between sessions: nutrition, dietetics, functional medicine, naturopathic medicine, health coaching, and therapists who want client engagement tools alongside their notes. It covers solo practitioners through the free Sprout plan for students and recent grads with up to three clients, per the pricing page, and group practices through the Team plan.
Practice Better is built around longitudinal wellness care. A large medical group running high-volume, insurance-first episodic care is solving a different problem, and a platform built around revenue cycle management, such as Tebra, matches that model more closely. Practice Better does support multi-provider teams. The question to answer is whether your care model is episodic or continuing.
The best EHR for an independent practice is the one built for its type of care and payment model. Wellness practices with care between sessions fit Practice Better, behavioral health practices billing insurance fit platforms like TherapyNotes, and medical practices focused on revenue cycle management fit platforms like Tebra.
The names that come up for this question are hospital systems, such as Epic, Oracle Health, and MEDITECH. Those run large hospital networks. Independent practices compare a different set of platforms built for their size, such as Practice Better, SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, Tebra, and Jane.
Practice Better offers a free Sprout plan for students and recent grads to use with up to three clients, and a Starter plan for practitioners working with more than three clients, per its pricing page.
Yes. Practice Better checks eligibility, submits claims, tracks status, and manages rejections through its Claim.MD integration for U.S. customers. Without a Claim.MD account, you can still create and export CMS-1500 claims and send superbills to clients, per the billing page.
Yes. Practice Better meets HIPAA, GDPR, PIPEDA, and PHIPA standards on every plan, encrypts client data end to end, and makes a Business Associate Agreement available, per the Team plan page.
Yes. Practice Better's Migration Concierge Service helps import your client files from your current software and includes one-on-one guidance for account setup, per the pricing page. Read the guide to switching your EHR for the full process.
Take your answers to the three questions above, your real intake form, and one real client workflow into a trial. Start a free trial of Practice Better and run your week on it before you decide.
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