Overview
SimplePractice earned its enormous following among therapists honestly: the platform is well designed, easy to learn, and the telehealth video is the most reliable we have used in behavioral health. For a psychiatrist whose practice is primarily psychotherapy with modest prescribing, it can absolutely work, and the client engagement tools are better than what most psychiatric platforms offer. The prescribing story is where psychiatrists need to slow down. There is no native EPCS, which means controlled substances require a separate e-prescribing system, a fragmented workflow, and duplicate patient records. Medication management features are minimal because prescribers were never the primary audience. We know psychiatrists who run happily on SimplePractice plus an external prescriber, and we know others who tried it and gave up within six months. The dividing line is almost always prescribing volume. Be honest about yours before you choose.
EPCS Workflow
This is the dealbreaker section for many readers, so plainly: SimplePractice does not offer native EPCS. Prescribing Schedule II through V medications electronically requires a separate platform running alongside it, with the workflow fragmentation that implies. For a psychotherapy practice that writes an occasional SSRI, the workaround is tolerable. For a practice with a Monday morning full of stimulant refills, it is not, and no amount of interface polish elsewhere compensates.
Note Flexibility
The note system is flexible and pleasant to use, with a large template library, a capable form builder, and an active community sharing configurations. Therapy documentation is where it shines; the writing experience is clean, autosave works, and the structure stays out of your way. Psychiatric prescribers will need to build custom templates to capture medication-specific data, and even then the absence of structured medication fields shows.
Telepsychiatry
Telehealth is the platform's best feature and it is not close. Video quality is consistently reliable, patients join from a link without downloads, and the waiting room experience is smooth. For practices that run largely on video, this is the standard the rest of the field should be measured against, and it is a big part of why so many therapy practices refuse to leave.
Medication Management
Basic. There is no comprehensive medication database, no interaction checking, and no structured trial history. Medications get documented in notes, which is fine until you need to reconstruct what a patient tried across three years, at which point it is very much not fine. Prescribing-focused psychiatrists should treat this section as decisive.
Billing
Billing is solid for standard scenarios, with integrated claim submission, a good client-facing payment experience, and clean superbill generation. Complex psychiatric billing, particularly high-volume split billing, pushes past what the system handles gracefully. For the therapy-centered practices the platform serves best, billing is a genuine strength.
Additional Features
The client portal is excellent, covering scheduling, intake, messaging, and reminders in a way that clients actually use without hand-holding. The mobile app is good. The community is large enough that almost any question you have has already been answered in a forum thread, which is an underrated form of vendor support.