Common questions
What is medical practice management software?
How is it different from an EHR?
What does practice management software cost?
How long does implementation take?
Why practices move to cloud practice management software
The move rarely starts with ambition; it starts with a reconciliation problem. A practice runs its calendar in one tool, its clinical notes in another, and its charges in a spreadsheet that somebody rebuilds every month, and the gaps between them are where money quietly disappears. A session that was delivered but never charged. A charge that does not match the note behind it. A cancellation nobody recorded, read by a payer six months later as low utilization.
A server in the office adds its own tax: backups someone must remember, updates someone must install, and a machine that makes working from home or a second location an IT project. Browser-based systems remove that layer entirely. The practice logs in, and the versions, backups and security patches are the vendor’s problem, covered by an agreement rather than by hope.
The deciding argument is usually structural, though: when the schedule, the note and the charge live in one system, they cannot disagree. The charge is generated from the session that actually happened, the note is pre-filled from what was actually captured, and the report at month end is a readout rather than an investigation.
What this medical practice management software does
- Included
Scheduling with validation at booking
Recurring series, provider and location calendars, cancellation reason codes. Warnings appear where the decision is made, at the booking slot, not in a report the next week.
- Included
Clinical notes and treatment plans
Templated notes with a draft to signed to co-signed to locked lifecycle, versioned, with an addendum path. Plans and notes are linked so documentation can be traced to a goal.
- Included
Charge capture and billing exports
Procedure and ICD-10 diagnosis capture at the point of the encounter, producing per-session exports for the practice or its biller to submit. Superbill and CMS-1500 PDF output follows on completion of our AMA CPT licence.
- Included
Patient payments and balances
Hosted card checkout, payment allocation and a running patient balance. Card data never touches our systems.
- Included
Reporting
Revenue by provider and location, collections, utilization and cancellation rates, with CSV export to your accounting system.
- Not included · v2
Electronic claim submission to payers
On the v2 roadmap. Today, finished charges hand off cleanly to whoever bills for you, which for most of our practices is exactly the workflow they already run.
How to choose between practice management software systems
Feature lists in this category converge, so comparing them line by line rarely settles anything. Three questions separate the systems that would actually change your week from the ones that would just replace your current screens.
1. Start with the workflow that breaks today
Three questions separate the problem you have from the problem a vendor wants you to have. Where does a session’s record live between delivery and payment? If the answer involves retyping, the constraint is billing data, not features. Who finds out first when something is wrong? If errors surface in month-end reports rather than at the moment of booking or documentation, the constraint is validation. And what happens when a key person is out? If nobody else knows how the spreadsheet works, the constraint is the system rather than the staffing. Buy for the workflow that is costing you money now, not for the longest feature list.
2. Check who submits your claims
Practices fall into two groups, and the right software differs for each. If a biller already handles your submissions, what you need is clean, complete exports in the format they ask for. If you submit electronically in-house, you need a system that transmits to payers directly, and MegAligna does not do that today.
3. Ask what the price actually is at your size
Per-user pricing and per-client pricing produce very different bills at the same practice. A 45-client agency with 70 staff pays roughly double under a per-learner model than under a per-active-staff model, or the reverse if the ratio is inverted. Model your own numbers before comparing headline rates.
How MegAligna compares to CentralReach, Motivity and SimplePractice
Competitor rows reflect each vendor's own published materials, retrieved August 4, 2026; sources at the end of this page. Where a competitor is ahead of us, the row says so.
| MegAligna | CentralReach | Motivity per learner | SimplePractice | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Published pricing 1 | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Direct electronic claim submission 2 | No | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Clients billed for separately | No | No | Yes | No |
- 1 CentralReach pricing is quote-only; figures in circulation are third-party estimates. Motivity publishes $24-48 per learner; SimplePractice publishes $49-99 per clinician.
- 2 A genuine gap in v1. If you submit your own claims electronically today, we are not yet the right system for you. Motivity documents third-party billing connections rather than bundled submission.
What cloud practice management software costs
One plan, per seat
$20 per clinical seat / month
$99 monthly minimum · no practice base fee · monthly, cancel any time
- Every feature included: no tiers, no add-on modules
- Admin, front-desk and biller seats free
- Clients and learners never charged for
- Add and remove seats yourself, prorated monthly
No card required to start.
| Seat | Per month |
|---|---|
| Supervisor / BCBA | $20 |
| Clinician | $20 |
| Technician / RBT | $20 |
| Admin | Free |
| Front desk | Free |
| Biller | Free |
| Clients / learners | Always free |
Per-learner vendors bill you more for every client you take on before that client generates revenue. Seats follow your team, not your caseload.
Where to start by practice type
Behavior-analytic agencies should start with the MegAligna ABA pages. Authorizations, data collection and supervision scheduling work differently enough there to need their own explanation.
Start where your practice does: ABA, physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy, pediatrics, podiatry, chiropractic, acupuncture or massage therapy. Three free tools need no account at all: the superbill generator, the 8-minute rule calculator and the ABA supervision calculator.
Try it end to end with test data
14 days, no card required. Use made-up patients while you evaluate — real patient information waits until a business associate agreement is in place.