Opinionated reviews and real-world tech stacks from a solo practitioner who has tested everything and has strong opinions about what actually works. No sponsored content. No affiliate games. Just three years of trial, error, and spreadsheets.
My philosophy is still small tools that do one job. The EMR is where I broke my own rule, because Hero replaced my billing service, my answering service, and my patient-comms tool in one bill, and it costs less than any one of them did. There are real tradeoffs: I'm trusting one vendor with a lot, and leaving would hurt. A leaner EMR plus a good human biller is a completely defensible setup too, and I know solo docs doing exactly that.
I almost paid $329 a month for a reputation platform before finding the same loop built into the EMR I already had. How the post-visit feedback and review routing actually works, the guardrails that surprised me, and why I will not turn on the positive-only gate.
A skeptical solo doc's take on what the more durable Medicare telehealth picture actually changes for a lean solo setup, and why a stable telehealth setup for a solo doctor still doesn't mean buying a bloated platform.
I am not a good coder. I have never been a good coder. After a year on Hero EMR's auto-coding, I have stopped pretending I should be.
She's leaving the hospital to open a solo psychiatry practice and wanted unfiltered advice. Here's what I told her, why, and what I'd warn her about.
How a solo doc actually handles nights, weekends, and vacations without burning out. The technology part, the coverage part, and the patient expectation part.
I've watched six colleagues open new practices in the last two years. Here's what actually matters when choosing your first EMR, and what I'd pick if I were doing it all over again.
Everything you need. Nothing you don't.