SimplePractice fully embeds RCM workflows in its EHR with Stedi
SimplePractice is a practice management and electronic health record (EHR) platform for independent mental and behavioral health practices. More than 250,000 providers use SimplePractice to care for more than 20 million patients.
SimplePractice's platform gives providers everything they need to run a private practice, including scheduling, clinical notes, telehealth, billing, and AI tools to reduce administrative burden.
Providers can use SimplePractice to enroll with insurance payers, submit claims, and post payments when they arrive – all without leaving the platform. In 2025, SimplePractice supported 63 million insurance appointments.
Challenge
A large part of the value SimplePractice brings to providers is simplifying revenue cycle management (RCM), the multi-step process providers follow to get paid.
"We have a large set of behavioral health clinicians on our platform, and we're piecing apart the problems they have with the revenue cycle – from credentialing and enrollment all the way through payments," says Shehzad Moiz, VP of Product at SimplePractice.
Many RCM steps run through a healthcare clearinghouse, the middle layer that connects providers and vendors like SimplePractice to payers. Independent behavioral health practices choose SimplePractice because it makes insurance and billing as easy as possible. Before working with Stedi, SimplePractice experienced several challenges, particularly with claims and transaction enrollments. This created friction for its customers and added stress to its customer support organization.
Claims
After a provider sees a patient, they can use SimplePractice to send an electronic claim to the patient's payer. Before a payer processes the claim, it runs the claim through a list of checks called edits. If the claim fails an edit, the payer rejects it. Some edits are the same across payers, but many are specific to a single payer.
A payer rejection can take days to come back. That leaves the provider less time to fix the claim and resend it before the payer's filing deadline.
To help providers catch errors sooner, clearinghouses and software vendors write their own edits that copy the payer's. The edits from SimplePractice's previous clearinghouse didn't catch enough. Claims still came back rejected, and providers got frustrated.
So SimplePractice wrote its own edits, including payer-specific ones. Payer quirks turned into custom logic that SimplePractice had to own.
ERA transaction enrollments
When a payer pays a provider, it also sends back a report – called a remittance – explaining the payment. When sent electronically, that report is called an Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA), and the payer sends it to the clearinghouse it has on file for that provider.
To receive ERAs, providers have to complete a process called transaction enrollment. Every payer requires it for ERAs, and every payer handles it differently. Some payers require a lot of paperwork.
That paperwork costs a clearinghouse money to absorb, so most legacy clearinghouses push it down to the provider. The result confused and frustrated providers, and SimplePractice couldn't give them the experience it wanted to.
"ERA transaction enrollment forms were one of the biggest pain points for our customers," says Shehzad. "The provider would get a PDF, then they'd have to print it out, fill it out in blue ink, and mail it in. That's where they stopped. We automated what we could, but that was never going to scale one payer at a time."
"ERA transaction enrollment forms were one of the biggest pain points for our customers."
Solution
To address both of these, SimplePractice moved its claims and ERA transaction enrollments to Stedi, a modern healthcare clearinghouse.
Claims
Every claim that SimplePractice submits through Stedi runs through Stedi's database of claim edits, which includes payer-specific edits. Those edits return clear errors in real time.
Stedi ships new claim edits weekly, based on customer feedback and real payer rejections. When a payer rejects a claim, Stedi records the rejection, works out the rule behind it, and writes an edit that applies to every Stedi customer.
"We don't need to spend time building our own claim rules. Our engineers get to spend more time on things our customers can see," says Shehzad.
"Our engineers get to spend more time on things our customers can see."
ERA transaction enrollments
Stedi offers fully managed, API-based transaction enrollment, where Stedi handles most of the process and the paperwork.
For the 1,500+ Stedi payers that support one-click enrollment for ERAs, submitting the request is all SimplePractice has to do. Stedi signs the enrollment forms for the provider by default.
Some payers don't support one-click enrollment and require the provider (or their delegate) to complete specific steps. In those cases, Stedi returns the next steps as tasks through its Enrollments API. SimplePractice can show and track those steps inside its own product, so providers never have to leave SimplePractice. When an enrollment request stalls, Stedi follows up with the payer.
"We love the way Stedi's transaction enrollments take work off the plate of the provider and the EHR," says Micah Sanders, Senior Product Manager at SimplePractice. "By actively increasing one-click enrollments and doing proactive follow-up, you're going beyond just being a platform for transactions and actually offering value to our customers."
"We love the way Stedi's transaction enrollments take work off the plate of the provider and the EHR."
Results
SimplePractice started submitting production claims and transaction enrollments through Stedi within a month of signing up. Shehzad credits Stedi's real-time support for the pace.
"The quality of support Stedi has given us has been phenomenal," says Shehzad. "Engineers are always skeptics, and given the hardships endured through a prior clearinghouse migration, there was a lot of scar tissue. Our experience with Stedi has healed that."
With Stedi's database of claim edits backing it, SimplePractice no longer needs to write payer edits itself. And fewer claims submitted through SimplePractice get rejected.
Transaction enrollments have also gotten better. With Stedi, 75% of SimplePractice's ERA transaction enrollments go through without the provider touching them.
That lets SimplePractice's team focus on the work its customers actually see – helping clinicians run their practices.
"The quality of support Stedi has given us has been phenomenal."
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