Charm has worked out mostly well for me. I've been using it for 2 weeks now.
The good parts are:
- Things are nicely integrated.
- Having questionnaires and intake notes be tied to appointments and sent out automatically.
- Prescriptions can be sent in the note and attached to the encounter.
- Labs are also integrated into the note (ordering and results) and you can create your own reference ranges.
- Same as DrFirst, prior auths can be completed from inside Charm.
- You can prescribe supplements from Fullscript.
- Calendar feels more robust as you can drag to increase time of appointment, have different color schemes, have a custom message to the patient for that appointment, mark whether it's a video, phone, or in person visit.
- You can set procedure codes and/or price for each visit type and require them to pay it beforehand (I only do this for intakes).
- Can actually require a credit card before signing up for an appointment instead of having to remind patients incessantly in Luminello.
- Can track vitals/graph them over time. Automated BMI calculator when you put height/weight in.
- You can create flowsheets to track stuff - usually for vitals but can be repurposed to track lots of other things like number of missed/late sessions, mood, rating scale scores, obsessive thoughts/compulsive behaviors (hair pulling episodes), etc. Specific flowsheets can be shared with patients and they can enter in their score on the portal/app.
- Integrated PDMP is nice. I never paid for this in Luminello/DrFirst.
- TWO WAY GOOGLE CALENDAR SYNC OMG. The #1 deficiency in Luminello in my opinion.
- I've had to create a work around for a prescreening form. They have to schedule a phone screen and part of that process is filling out a prescreen questionnaire. I can then review and reject/accept the phone screen based on the prescreen responses. Also a work around so patients don't see your full visit type calendar is to create a separate facility that is for new patients where they can book on that time, then transferred over to your full facility calendar where they can book intakes/follow-ups and see your full calendar once you accept them after the phone screen.
- Kept my negotiated Bluefin rates rather than going up to 3.15% with SP, although there was an issue configuring it over to Charm from Luminello. It uses the same API key but they needed to fix a read/write issue on the back end. This alone will save me thousands of dollars per year.
- Different fee schedules work out pretty well, rather than doing full fee + discount (which is what PracticeQ does) or not having this functionality at all (SimplePractice).
- Integrated telehealth with Zoom works better than doxy.me.
- Charm migration team moved over all the notes and organized it by date, consent documents, and demographic information for all my patients for $750. They did not transfer future appointments and patient family/parent information unfortunately nor did they transfer billing and meds. I had my assistant download this before Luminello shut down and upload it into each patient's chart.
- Customer service answers their phone with a US based person during business hours immediately. They are VERY helpful when speaking to someone directly and I've been using this quite often.
- You can customize the automated emails, text messages, voice calls to patients on what it says. You can customize invoice and superbills to look however you want it to.
- Can search for other peoples' templates but they also aren't that great for my specifications.
- Customizing note templates is much easier than Luminello where I can create check boxes, drop down menus, multiline vs single line responses for fields, and default text within each field and default checkbox/dropdown selection so that I don't have to use snippets/TextExpander as much.
- Two factor authentication with face ID or touch ID is nice.
- New caregiver portal for parents which I highly value as a CAP.
- I chat with my assistant through the EMR as it is integrated and HIPAA compliant. I can also assign tasks to them through Charm.
The bad parts:
- It's has an uglier aesthetic and font scheme than PracticeQ and SimplePractice, and might be equivocal to Luminello (vomit green and poop brown/yellow).
- It can be cluttered. Lots of unnecessary functions like vaccinations, vaccination reminders, or infusions and such that are meant for other specialties. You can customize this to remove anything that is unnecessary. It takes more time to set it up just the way you want it.
- Customer service emails often get lost in translation as they don't really understand the issue most of the time and maybe half the time solve it completely the first time.
- Hard to get a demo time as it's not intuitive on the website, but their sales team has a Calendly schedule where you can book times yourself.
- Billing and invoicing takes more steps. When you sign the encounter, you create an invoice but can't charge the patient immediately from the chart like Luminello. You have to then go to the billing at the end of the day where you can bulk process credit cards for the unpaid invoices.
There's a bunch of functions that I haven't used, like you can customize the patient portal app to make it look like your specific practice made it, or you can communicate/message with providers at different health systems through a HIPAA compliant method. I don't take insurance so haven't explored that functionality.
If I think of more, I'll update this. Overall, I'm really happy with Charm and I think it's a big step up from Luminello. It feels like a more mature, thought out, further developed product.
