How Clinic Stack reviews software

Clinic Stack writes about the software clinics rely on. This page explains how we work, so you can decide how much weight an article deserves.

Six questions we put to any software

Whether an article covers a type of product or one in particular, the same questions come up:

• Does it suit a small practice, front desk and billing office included?
• Who owns the data, and how easily can it leave?
• What does it connect to?
• Where does the vendor write down its security and privacy commitments?
• How plain are the pricing and the contract, and what does leaving cost?
• Is support promised in writing, or only on a sales call?

No prices, no rankings

Vendor prices and feature tables go stale with every release, so we skip them. You get the questions to ask instead, and the EHR vendor question list shows the idea. We also do not crown a best product, because the right one depends on the practice.

What a product article rests on

An article about one product names what the writers looked at: public documentation, a published contract template, a demo or a trial. We say a product does something only if we saw it in the source. Anything else is marked as a question for the vendor.

Not clinical, legal or compliance advice

We are not a law firm, a compliance consultant or a clinical authority. On HIPAA we send you to HHS at hhs.gov, which publishes the rules and guidance, and the HIPAA software checklist shows how we use it. Your compliance officer or counsel makes the call for your own practice. Please leave patient information out of anything you send us.

Check the date, then tell us what is off

Software and rules move quickly, so read the date at the top of a page before acting on it. If something looks wrong, email write@theclinicstack.com with the page title and what you found. If you are right, we correct the page and give it a new revised date.