Switching to Practice Better from Jane or another EHR? What to know before you move

We've recommended Practice Better to practitioners for years, long before we had any business reason to. So when someone tells us they're thinking about making the move, we get a little excited for them.

We also know that switching EHRs is one of the more stressful projects a practice takes on. A little preparation makes an enormous difference. Here's what's worth knowing before you start.

*If you haven't started yet, Practice Better offers a free trial: start your Practice Better free trial here.*

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this page are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you make a purchase through them, at no additional cost to you.)

Ask about the Migration Concierge Service first

Practice Better offers a Migration Concierge Service for practices moving over from another platform. Before you plan to move anything by hand, find out what it can handle for you. It's the obvious first call and a surprising number of people skip it.

Plan to rebuild your templates

This is the one that surprises people most.

Note templates and form templates can't be imported from another portal, and Practice Better's team can't do it for you. You'll rebuild them, either by hand or using Practice Better's Automatic Form Builder.

A few tips that save real time:

• Fillable forms can be uploaded, which gives you a head start on existing PDFs.
• The AI form and template builder has a length limit. If you're migrating long documents, load what fits, then go back into the builder and add the rest with additional prompts.
• Treat it as a chance to clean up. Most practices carry forms they haven't looked at in years. You don't have to migrate everything. You have to migrate what you'd actually keep.

Check your plan before you design anything

Practice Better gates features by plan tier, and it's much easier to pick the right plan than to discover a missing feature mid-build.

Programs, group sessions, SMS reminders, recurring forms and Zapier all require Professional or above. If you're going to want any integration with other tools, you'll need Professional at minimum, since Zapier isn't available below that.

Map out what you actually use today, and what you want to be using in a year, then choose the tier.

Translate your offers into Practice Better's structure

Every EHR organizes things a little differently. In Practice Better:

• A Service is a single bookable appointment type.
• A Package bundles a set number of sessions and tracks usage.
• A Program delivers content over time, and clients enroll rather than book.

Write your current offers down and decide which of these each one becomes before you start building. It avoids the most common rebuild we see, which is an offer set up as the wrong type.

Set up form mappings from day one

When you rebuild your intake, set up form mappings at the same time. They send form answers straight into the right fields of the client record, so nobody retypes anything.

It's far easier to design an intake around mappings from the start than to retrofit them later. We wrote a full guide: How to make your Practice Better intake forms fill in the client record automatically.

Don't migrate your old workarounds

Every practice has a few. The spreadsheet that tracks something your old system couldn't. The reminder someone sends by hand every Friday.

Before you rebuild those in Practice Better, ask whether you still need them. A lot of workarounds exist because of limitations in the system you're leaving.

One more thing to plan for

Practice Better will run your clinical world beautifully. It's worth knowing, before you switch, what an EHR isn't built to do: follow up with people who inquired and never booked, and reach patients after care ends. Those live in a separate operations layer. Knowing that up front means you won't spend your first month trying to make your EHR do something it was never designed for.

*Disclosure: the Practice Better free trial link in this post is an affiliate link, which means we may earn a commission if you sign up through it. It doesn't change your price and it doesn't change what we recommend.*

Would rather hand this to someone?

Our Practice Better setup is $997 for one practitioner, one location and up to three programs, whether you're building from scratch or fixing what you have. Form mappings, automations, permissions, all of it, tested end to end.