SimplePractice Delivers Innovative Group Practice EHR Features

It can be demanding to wear all the hats necessary to run a successful private practice. And, for those who run a group practice—between hiring and managing clinicians, marketing your group practice, managing clients, and overseeing business operations—the responsibilities are more involved. 

In order to better support group practices, building on its suite of practice management and EHR tools and services, SimplePractice recently launched new features that enhance the group practice experience. 

SimplePractice’s new group practice EHR features include:

• Measurement-based care
• Client waitlist 
• Advanced calendar filters 

Based on a survey conducted by SimplePractice in April 2023, group practices using SimplePractice reported a satisfaction rate of over 95% and claimed to save over 176 hours a year on administrative tasks. 

SimplePractice’s latest features reaffirm commitment to be the practice management partner for growing private practitioners—so clinicians can deliver better care and boost administrative efficiency.  

Here’s an overview of the new SimplePractice group practice EHR features designed to make managing and growing your private practice—all in one place—easier than ever. 

Measurement-based care (MBC)

MBC, also known as evidence-based care, is the use of measures or questionnaires to collect client-reported feedback throughout therapy. 

This helps therapists attune treatment to the evolution of each clients’ symptoms, track progress on symptom improvement and treatment goals, empower clients to collaborate with clinicians in their treatment, and track a group practice’s progress toward goals and objects they’ve set. 

For group practice owners, the last function of MBC is particularly helpful in standardizing care and facilitating cross-collaboration between providers. MBC can also help you with supervision, employee review, and identifying opportunities for improvement. 

Clinicians can confidently help clients reach their goals by automatically sending and analyzing client-reported feedback, like the PHQ-9 or GAD-7 forms routinely shared with clients. Then, you’ll be able to unlock growth opportunities and make data-backed decisions from the practice-wide reporting we’ve built in—providing account owners with digestible insights to fuel decision making processes. 

To learn more about the benefits of MBC and how to utilize it in your practice, check out our article: What Is Measurement-Based Care and What Are Its Benefits to Practitioners?. 

If you’re a SimplePractice customer, refer to our step-by-step guide on the SimplePractice Measurement-Based Care feature.

You can also register for our How to Use Measurement-Based Care to Strengthen Therapeutic Alliances webinar, which will be held Thursday, December 7 at 12 noon PT. 

Client waitlist

As clinicians build their client lists, they may find that their schedules can’t always accommodate the influx of new client requests.  

In a survey on therapist burnout conducted by SimplePractice this fall, “over 50% of all therapists surveyed said their schedules are usually completely filled each day.” This statistic is in alignment with last year’s American Psychological Association’s (APA) survey, which found that 60% of psychologists didn’t have any openings for new patients. 

Furthermore, in SimplePractice’s burnout report, 55% of survey respondents attributed administrative tasks to their burnout and a quarter of respondents noted their caseloads were too high. 

Of course, managing caseloads is significantly more complex in a group practice setting. Keeping up with the growing demand for mental health services, specifically, can exacerbate the administrative burden of scheduling and accepting new clients in a practice with multiple clinicians. 

This is why SimplePractice’s client waitlist is crucial to fostering scalable growth for clinicians, especially those with group practices to manage. 

The client waitlist feature provides the administrative infrastructure for you to manage your caseload, and provide care within your practice’s bandwidth. When a clinician in your practice is ready to accept new clients, they can conveniently schedule an appointment from the waitlist or the calendar.  It also provides you with the functionality to view all the new client requests coming through your waitlist, so you can consider hiring for your group practice to accommodate the growing demand for your services. 

Use our guide on Managing the Client Waitlist for step-by-step instructions.

Advanced calendar filters  

Calendar filtering and customization has been a feature request from our customers for quite some time, and we’re so excited to have delivered. 

Group practice owners and administrators can filter appointments on their shared calendar by office location, treating clinician(s), new client appointments, clients with incomplete documentation, clients with unpaid invoices, or based on clients’ insurance providers. 

For group practices with multiple office locations and multiple treating clinicians, filtering the calendar according to these specificities can help keep a practice organized—making sure nothing falls through the cracks. 

For example, the Practice Manager, Scheduler, or Account Owner may want to make sure that all new clients for the day have completed their intake forms. In this case, the team member would apply the “New clients” and “Incomplete documents” in the “Day” view. You can then send them a reminder to complete their documentation.  

In another example, if you’re in a group practice with multiple locations, or a hybrid work environment—with an option to see clients virtually—you can choose when to schedule appointments at the office or a certain office depending on existing appointments’ locations. 

As a practice, there may be days designated for team meetings, supervision hours, or collaboration. On those days, it may be helpful to set your availability to that office location and make sure your clients are coming into the office where you have team commitments. 

Alternatively, if the occupancy for a certain office location is full, you can preemptively opt to hold your appointments at a different location or virtually. 

Find out all the ways you can customize the view of your practice’s calendar on SimplePractice by reading our guide on Navigating Your Calendar. 

How the new group practice features can be used in tandem 

SimplePractice has always included paperless documentation, note-taking, and intake forms. However, the ability to check which clients with upcoming appointments haven’t completed their paperwork—on a large-scale—is a new and exciting development. 

With advanced calendar filters, you can implement standardized MBC practices—ensuring that clinicians are collecting client-reported feedback to accurately measure goal setting of clinical treatments at your practice. 

By offering online booking, group practice owners and administrators can empower clinicians to set their availability on their individual calendars and select services to offer during these timeblocks. As an Account Owner, by empowering your clinicians to set their schedule and services, you lessen the administrative workload on practice administrators and yourself. 

With the client waitlist feature, you can create a system for accepting new clients. This feature, coupled with our data-backed reporting capabilities, allows group practices to fine-tune the clients they are best suited to help. As a group practice owner, consider accepting clients based on these strengths and the clinical specialties and services your clinicians are available to provide. 

We look forward to continuing to deliver features that are integral to running a thriving group practice—boosting efficiency for business operations so clinicians can focus on what matters most, delivering quality care. 

Stay tuned for upcoming functionality that continues making SimplePractice a best-in-class, all-in-one practice management software. 

How SimplePractice streamlines running your practice

SimplePractice is HIPAA-compliant practice management software with everything you need to run your practice built into the platform—from booking and scheduling to insurance and client billing.

If you’ve been considering switching to an EHR system, SimplePractice empowers you to streamline appointment bookings, reminders, and rescheduling and simplify the billing and coding process—so you get more time for the things that matter most to you.

Try SimplePractice free for 30 days. No credit card required.

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