Mental and behavioral health EHR buyers' guide
It's often hard to know where to begin when selecting a mental and behavioral health EHR. Making the wrong choice isn’t just costly. In the worst cases, it can jeopardize your practice’s ability to provide the best care for your patients.
That’s why we’ve put together this buyer’s guide for mental health EHR software. We’ll discuss:
- What features you should look for in an EHR for your behavioral and mental health practice
- How much mental and behavioral health EHR should cost
- Vendors to consider
Needs vary by practice size and type. Multi-specialty practices have different requirements than clinics dealing specifically with substance abuse. This guide will give you a solid foundation for finding the right system for your behavioral health practice.
What is a mental health EHR?
A mental health EHR is medical software designed for practices focused on behavioral health, including counseling, psychiatry, and group practices.
It has unique features to equip mental healthcare providers with tools to work effectively with patients. These include specific medical templates for physicians and patient portals for easy booking.
What is the best mental health EHR software for small clinics?
Small clinics face unique challenges when choosing a mental health EHR system, including budget constraints, the need for user-friendly interfaces, and essential behavioral health features.
Top EHR options for small clinics include Carelogic EHR, Valant, TherapyNotes, and ICANotes. These systems are recognized for robust mental health features, scalability, and support for small practices.
Small clinics should prioritize EHRs that are easy to implement, cost-effective, and offer strong customer support.
The best EHR system depends on your practice's requirements and whether you need a specialized best-of-breed solution or one that meets multiple specialties.
Popular behavioral health EHRs built for mental health practices include Carelogic EHR, Valant, TherapyNotes, and ICANotes.
Several all-encompassing EHR systems serve mental health providers too, including Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), Veradigm (formerly Allscripts), and Epic EHR
What features should I look for in a behavioral and mental health EHR?
You’ll need a clear understanding of where your current system is letting you down, key stakeholder interests, and how you hope a new EHR will improve things for your clinicians.
Challenges you’ll need to address include:
- Patients on complex treatment plans: Mental health recovery plans frequently need to accommodate talking therapies, medication, socio-economic factors and input from other providers
- The need to accommodate multiple facility types: Clinicians treat mental health patients as inpatients, outpatients and everything in between
- Patient confidentiality and data protection: this is crucial for mental health practices; any new software should help meet compliance needs surrounding this.
To meet these challenges head-on and ensure the best possible outcomes for your patients, there are several EHR features you should be considering.
We’ll start with the basics:
- Your EHR should meet all compliance requirements. Ideally, you’ll want to be Meaningful Use certified to at least level two, and it goes without saying that HIPAA compliance is a must-have
- An e-prescribing module allows you to keep on top of patient prescriptions and reduce unnecessary paperwork. It’ll need to be equipped to deal with controlled substance prescriptions too
- Lab integration is useful for getting test results back quickly and efficient results sharing with other healthcare providers
- Flexible charting styles are a must-have; behavioral and mental health is a broad church, and patients present in a variety of ways. You need to enable your clinicians to deal with this.
- Patient portal and other engagement tools: Patients with serious mental illness often face higher rates of preventable conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory issues. Behavioral health practices can use patient engagement tools, like those in patient portals, to help. These tools encourage treatment compliance and provide prevention education, improving patient outcomes.
- Telehealth support: Telehealth is a powerful tool for reaching underserved areas and improving access to care. A study by Telehealth and Medicine Today found most mental health practitioners see telehealth as essential for improving services and quality of care.
- Insurance billing support: Insurance billing support is critical for small clinics and private practices. Look for EHR platforms that streamline insurance claims, provide electronic claims submission, verify patient eligibility, and automate coding for behavioral health services. Efficient insurance billing features reduce administrative workload and ensure faster reimbursement for mental health providers.
- Integration of care with other providers: Patients needing behavioral health services often face multiple disorders and co-occurring conditions. To provide comprehensive care, providers must coordinate with other healthcare providers. Your EHR should support interoperability, allowing seamless information sharing, record requests, and updates on treatment history and plans.
To enhance your clinicians’ experience with the software and to get the maximum benefit out of your mental health EHR, consider some of these more advanced options:
- Specialty-specific menus and intake forms can make all the difference to your clinicians' workflow, particularly when a patient has a long or complicated treatment history. In a psychiatric environment, documentation tools should include the Sadness Scale and suicidal/violent risk factor assessments, for example.
- Hands-free notes: Whether through dictation or pre-programmed buttons, this allows for better patient engagement. In environments where a lot rests on how the patient describes their illness, this is extremely useful
ICANotes’ interface. Note the buttons down the side to simplify note-taking and minimize the need for typing
- Medication management - as mental health conditions are often comorbid with physical disorders, your physicians need to keep on top of other prescriptions patients might be taking. Medication management helps to do this and can provide alerts if there’s a risk of a harmful drug interaction.
How much does mental and behavioral health EHR cost?
This is a big question - perhaps bigger than you might initially think.
It’s difficult to give any sort of useful average here, as the baseline price offered by vendors is really just the start of it. The overall cost of an EHR system will depend on a number of factors, each of which will be different for each practice. These include:
- Deployment method
- Whether you need to update your hardware (for on-premise systems)
- The support package you choose
- Implementation services offered by the vendor - e.g training, consultancy, data migration
- Reduced practice throughput during implementation
- Overtime worked by staff during implementation (whether to make up for lost efficiency or to implement the system itself)
That said, baseline prices can be useful in creating your budget, as long as you forecast for hidden costs as well.
Vendors can be a bit cloak-and-dagger about how much a system will cost. Sometimes this is because they’ll need a better idea of what you’re after (modules, customization, etc.) before they can give you a reliable quote. Sometimes it’s simply a case of selling first, talking price later.
We’ve taken a snapshot of some mental and behavioral health vendors’ prices from our EHR pricing guide to start you off - though do check out the whole thing if you need some broader data.
Cloud-based behavioral health EHR (prices per provider/per month):
- Practice Fusion: From $199/provider/month
- ICANotes: (Based on full-time clinicians) Notes Only: $55/month, Non-Prescribing: $75/month, Prescribing: $213/month.
ICANotes tiered pricing structure. Why it’s essential to nail down your user requirements before budgeting.
- drchrono: From $199/provider/month
- CureMD EHR: $295/provider/month
On-premise behavioral health EHRs (prices are a one-off fee per provider):
- Amazing Charts: $249/month (from $229/month/provider for SaaS)
Use our EHR budget calculator to build a realistic five-year budget for your project
Which vendors should I consider?
There are a few approaches you could take here.
The first is searching for a specialty-specific EHR. These are systems that have been built around the needs of behavioral and mental health clinicians.
These are generally more likely to contain the ‘advanced’ features outlined above and will probably require less customization to suit your workflow. On the other hand, interoperability could be an issue, as larger, more well-known systems are often better designed to integrate with other software.
Specialty-specific EHRs suit specialty-specific practices best. If you do mental and behavioral health and nothing else, here are a few good options to consider:
- Carelogic EHR: provided by Qualifacts, Carelogic is designed for use in a range of mental and behavioral health settings, including psychiatry, therapy, substance abuse, and more. Deployments tend to be in practices with 20 clinicians or more.
- ICANotes EHR: ICANotes is a web-based psychiatry EHR used by a wide range of mental health professionals. It allows users to take mental health progress notes and reports without typing or transcription expenses by using a range of pre-formatted buttons.
ICANotes’ calendar and scheduling tool
- Valant EHR: Valant is a cloud EHR designed for both behavioral and mental health-focused private practices. It works well on smartphones and tablets, and the UX is based on a mobile app design for familiarity and ease of use.
Recording a patient encounter in Valant.
Another option would be to look at a multi-specialty vendor offering mental and behavioral health workflows and pre-customized templates. This is a sort of ‘halfway house’ solution which could suit multi-specialty practices that need more than just a mental health EHR, but lack the time and resources for heavy customization.
Finally, you could choose a general EHR and customize it to suit your workflow. This could be a good idea if you’re part of a multi-specialty practice looking for a solution that can be adapted to all your needs.
