How to run a practice software evaluation

Most software evaluations go the same way. Someone gathers brochures, sits through three demos, likes one, and signs. Six months later the practice has discovered the thing the demo did not cover. It is avoidable, and the fix costs about a week of attention up front.

Step one: write down what you actually do

Before contacting a single vendor, spend a week documenting your real workflow. Not the official version. The actual one, including every workaround.

Follow one client visit end to end: booking, arrival, consult, treatment, dispensing, invoicing, payment, reminder. Write down every step, every system touched, every piece of paper. Then do the same for a surgery day, a euthanasia, and a referral out.

You will find two things. Some steps exist only because your current system requires them, and they can disappear. Others are genuinely load-bearing, and any new system has to handle them. That second list is your evaluation criteria, and it is worth more than any feature comparison you can download.

Step two: separate wants from requirements

Take your list and sort every item into three buckets:

• Must have. The practice cannot operate without it. Be ruthless: most lists have three to five genuine entries, not twenty.
• Should have. Real value, but you could work around its absence for a while.
• Nice to have. Everything else.

Most disappointing purchases come from treating a "should have" as a "must have" and then trading away something that mattered more.

Step three: run the demo on your scenarios

This is the step that changes outcomes. A standard demo runs on the vendor's data, in the vendor's order, avoiding the awkward parts. It tells you almost nothing.

Instead, send your three or four hardest scenarios ahead of the call and ask them to walk through those. Good ones to use:

• A client with three pets, two of them on repeat medication, one on a payment plan
• A surgery with an estimate, a consent form, and a change of plan mid-procedure
• A referral out, with records going to another practice
• Whatever your team complains about most in your current system

Watch how many clicks each takes. Count them. The difference between systems on a task done forty times a day is the difference you will actually feel.

Step four: talk to the team who will use it

The people who suffer a bad choice are usually not the people making it. Get at least one nurse, one receptionist and one clinician into a demo, and give their objections real weight. Front-desk friction is expensive and invisible from the practice owner's chair.

Step five: ask the uncomfortable questions

Before signing, get answers to these in writing:

• If we leave, what do we get? Ask for the export format specifically. "You can export your data" is not an answer.
• Who runs the migration, and what does it cost? Included, or a separate line item that appears later?
• Can we see a test migration of our real data? Not a demo set. Yours. What comes back is the most informative thing in the whole process.
• What happens to our integrations? List every system that currently talks to your software and get each one confirmed.
• What is the contract length, and what happens at renewal?
• What does support look like in our timezone, in our first month?
• What is the total first-year cost, including migration, training and any per-user charges?

Step six: check the reference the vendor did not give you

Vendor-supplied references are selected. Useful, but selected. Find a practice of similar size running the system that the vendor did not introduce you to, and ask them one question: what do you wish you had known before you signed?

A note on timing

Do not migrate in your busiest season, and do not migrate with a short-staffed team. The software is rarely the problem. The problem is that a migration consumes attention for weeks, and a practice already at capacity does not have weeks to give.