Item: Kareo EHR
Rating: 1
Author: Max von Hippel

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a small to medium size telehealth clinic offering psychological and psychiatric services primarily within the state of Alaska. We moved to Kareo as we thought it would consolidate our needs for both an EHR and a billing service into one.

Pros and Cons

Sales

Reliability of the telehealth platform
Ability to ingest data from other EHRs, e.g., TherapyNotes
Transparency of billing
Customer service
Usability
Honesty in sales

Return on Investment

Spent >7K on a service that did not work
Spent >10k on training and IT to support said non-functional service and then, get off of it when it failed
Learned valuable lesson about disingenuous sales tactics

Alternatives Considered

Kareo EHR is less reliable than Therapy Notes. Therapy Notes is less feature rich, for example, it is not as good for generating PDF bills to send to customers (we had to write our own code for this), but it always works.

Kareo's telehealth platform is less reliable than Doxy. It frequently crashes and freezes. Doxy always works.

Kareo's billing system seemed to work reasonably well for us overall.

Notably, Kareo's sales team explicitly promised they could import health data from Therapy Notes, but this is false. When they were unable to do so we spent thousands of dollars having all our data imported manually. And then Kareo simply did not work -- it routinely froze or crashed -- and Kareo refused to refund us.

Key Insights

Do you think Kareo EHR delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Kareo EHR's feature set?

No

Did Kareo EHR live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Kareo EHR go as expected?

No

Would you buy Kareo EHR again?

No

Other Software Used

doxy.me, Google Workspace, RingCentral Meetings

Likelihood to Recommend

Kareo is not an appropriate application for any real-world clinical need. It is highly unreliable, crashing frequently, and often becomes frozen. It also cannot ingest data from Therapy Notes, which was a promised feature of the platform according to the sales team. Additionally, when we ran into reliability issues (every day, with every clinician at the practice, across a dozen different office locations with different internet service providers) we were not offered the ability to cancel our contract. Until the reliability issues are fixed Kareo is not well-suited to any use case because it does not work.

Users and Roles

11 - 3 administrators, 1 IT admin, and 7 clinicians

Support Headcount Required

1 - IT admin

Business Processes Supported

secure teleconferencing
records management
billing

Likelihood to Renew

1

Kareo was a massive waste of money. It's an unreliable product without promised features and sold by a disingenuous sales team. We will stick to reliable services like Doxy, Therapy Notes, etc.

Products Replaced

Yes - We chose Kareo because it was meant to replace Doxy, Therapy Notes, and our billing service, all at once. But it did not do so successfully.

Key Differentiators

Scalability
Integration with Other Systems
Ease of Use

The most important consideration was that we could pay 1 subscription for effectively 3 services (records, billing, and telehealth). But it failed to provide this reliably (if at all).

Pros	Cons
None	Do not like to use Inconsistent Cumbersome Feel nervous using

Easy Tasks

Billing

Difficult Tasks

Secure videoconferencing
Writing medical records
Accessing medical records
Importing data

Kareo was unreliable, didn't include promised feature, and cost a lot.

Overall Satisfaction with Kareo EHR