Using Theracharts Alongside Your EHR
If you already use an EHR like SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, or Jane, you might wonder why you'd add another tool. Fair question. The short answer: your EHR handles the business of therapy. Theracharts handles the clinical intelligence.
They're not competing — they're complementary.
What your EHR does well
EHRs were designed to solve the operational side of running a practice. Scheduling, billing, insurance claims, superbills, intake paperwork, credit card processing — these are genuinely hard problems, and tools like SimplePractice and TherapyNotes handle them well. If you're a solo practitioner or group practice, your EHR is probably the backbone of how you get paid.
Nobody is suggesting you stop using it. These tools have been refined over years to handle the complex, regulation-heavy requirements of running a therapy business, and switching away from a working EHR is almost never the right move.
Where most EHRs stop
The gap shows up when you try to do clinical work inside your EHR. Ask yourself:
Can your EHR automatically score a PHQ-9 and show you the severity band? Can it chart a client's GAD-7 scores over 12 sessions so you can see the trend line? Does it alert you when a client's score jumps two severity levels between sessions? Can it generate a paste-ready clinical update from a client's measured data? Does your client have a mobile app where they complete validated assessments between sessions and view their own progress?
For most EHRs, the answer to all of these is no. Not because they're bad software — because they were built to solve a different problem. EHRs are practice management systems that happen to store clinical data. They weren't designed as clinical intelligence platforms that actively support treatment decisions. That distinction matters, and it's the gap that creates the need for a complementary tool.
What Theracharts adds
Theracharts is a clinical intelligence layer. It focuses entirely on the parts of therapy practice that EHRs typically don't touch:
Related reading: why EHRs fall short for clinical work, setting up outcome tracking, and the right tech stack.
100+ validated clinical assessments with automatic scoring, severity interpretation, and longitudinal tracking. PHQ-9, GAD-7, PCL-5, AUDIT, DASS-21, and dozens more — all free on every plan.
Outcome trend charts that show you how a client is changing over time, with clinical severity bands overlaid. One glance before a session tells you whether someone is improving, plateauing, or getting worse.
Clinical alerts that flag significant score changes automatically. You know before the session starts if something needs attention.
Clinical Updates — a data-grounded narrative of assessment trends, alerts, completion patterns, and goal progress since your last export. Turn on the autopilot (it's opt-in) and Theracharts watches your caseload, flagging the clients and couples with meaningful new data and keeping each update ready to review. You edit it, then paste it into the data-summary part of your EHR's session note. Theracharts complements your EHR's note surface; it doesn't replace it.
AI clinical insights that read a client's assessment history and surface the patterns worth a closer look, plus natural-language queries across your whole caseload.
A client portal where clients complete assigned assessments on their phone between sessions, view their progress, and access their safety plan.
Couples comparison tools, clinical referral workflows, supervisor caseload oversight, and a full genogram builder — none of which exist in mainstream EHRs.
What a typical day looks like using both
Here's how therapists who use Theracharts alongside their EHR typically structure their workflow:
Morning: Check your EHR for today's schedule. Open Theracharts to review clinical alerts and any assessment completions that came in overnight. Clients who completed a PHQ-9 or GAD-7 via the client portal already have updated trend charts waiting for you.
Before each session: Glance at the client's Theracharts dashboard — recent scores, trend direction, any alerts. This takes 30 seconds and gives you a data-informed starting point for the conversation.
During the session: Use Theracharts session tools if needed (grounding exercises, coping worksheets, safety planning). If you're doing couples work, the comparison panel shows perception gaps in real time.
After the session: Write your session note in your EHR as usual. Generate a Clinical Update in Theracharts and paste it into the data-summary part of that note. Assign the next round of assessments for the client to complete before the next session.
Billing: Handle entirely in your EHR, as usual. Theracharts suggests CPT codes based on session duration, but your EHR is where claims get filed.
Moving data between systems
Until direct integrations are live, copy-paste and PDF export are the bridge. Clinical Updates are plain text built to paste straight into your EHR's note fields. Outcome reports and assessment summaries can be exported as a clean PDF and uploaded to your EHR's document storage, so everything lives in one place for record-keeping purposes.
Outcome reports include trend charts, score histories, and clinical interpretations — the kind of documentation that strengthens your clinical record even if your EHR doesn't generate it natively.
Direct EHR integration is coming
SimplePractice API integration is on the Theracharts roadmap. The plan includes OAuth-based connection, client matching between systems, and schedule reading. This means eventually you'll be able to move data between tools without manual copy-paste.
But you don't need to wait for that. The PDF workflow is clean enough that hundreds of therapists already use complementary tools this way.
Who this works best for
This setup makes the most sense if you're a therapist who wants to practice measurement-based care but your EHR doesn't support it. If you've ever thought "I wish I could track outcomes more systematically" or "I want data to show clients their progress" — that's exactly the gap Theracharts fills.
You keep your EHR for everything it's good at. You add Theracharts for everything it's not.
Theracharts has a free plan with up to 10 active clients and all 100+ assessments. You can try it alongside your existing EHR today without changing anything about your current workflow — just adding a clinical intelligence layer on top.