How to choose a charting platform for your lactation private practice – UPDATED March 2026

Updated March 2026!

I first started researching charting platforms back in 2017 when I was writing the first edition of my first book, Paperless Private Practice for Lactation Consultants. It seems like there was a lot of growth and change with online platforms between then and when I last updated this post in 2021, but then everything pretty much stabilized. I’ve been using IntakeQ for seven years now, which says something about its particular staying power.

Recently, however, the landscape seems to be shifting again. AI tools are on the rise, more payers are contracting with IBCLCs, and group lactation practices have become more common. At the same time, prices on everything have spiked dramatically. This feels like a great time to revisit what’s out there, see what’s changed, and evaluate if and how I can improve my workflows for me and for my employees.

Get a free comparison chart here.

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Table of Contents

• Platforms covered in this post
• Privacy — HIPAA, PIPEDA, GDPR
• Customizable Templates vs. Lactation Specific
• Client Intake Experience
• Integrated Online Scheduling
• Secure Messaging
• Clickable Links in Care Plans
• Insurance Billing and Claim Tracking
• Integrated Payment Processing
• Growth Charts
• Telehealth
• Pricing
• Group Practices
• Help me choose!
• A note on MilkNotes and Mobile Lactation Consultant

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Platforms covered in this post

• ChARM EHR
• IntakeQ / PracticeQ
• Practice Better
• Jane
• Google Workspace
• Microsoft Office 365
• Simple Practice
• Jotform
• Kalix
• CarePatron

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Privacy

HIPAA

All of these platforms promise HIPAA compliance and provide you with a Business Associates Agreement — except Jotform. Jotform does provide a BAA on its Gold and Enterprise plans, but please note that they state in the BAA that Jotform “is not an electronic health record… and should not be used to maintain a Designated Record Set.” CarePatron provides a BAA and is HIPAA, GDPR, PIPEDA, and SOC 2 compliant.

PIPEDA

Jane and Practice Better are Canadian companies and promise full PIPEDA compliance. Kalix and CarePatron also support PIPEDA for Canadian practitioners. In many instances, HIPAA compliance will make a platform PIPEDA compliant as well, but if you are required to store your data on Canadian servers, stick with a Canadian platform.

GDPR

Jane, IntakeQ, Practice Better, Office 365, and Google Workspace offer specific tools and guidance for GDPR compliance. CarePatron also lists GDPR compliance.

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Customizable Templates vs. Lactation Specific

Customization is the single most important deciding factor when choosing a charting platform for lactation private practice — at least going by the conversations I’ve had with the lactation consultants in the Facebook group over the years. If you want pre-made intake forms and charting templates specific to lactation work, jump to the end of this post for a note on MilkNotes and Mobile Lactation Consultant.

All the rest allow you to create your own charting templates, or import templates that others have made — like the ones I’ve made for ChARM, Google Workspace, Office 365, Practice Better, Jane, and IntakeQ/PracticeQ. I’m in the process of finalizing templates for Kalix as well, so watch this space!

The IntakeQ workflow is unique in that it allows you to automate how your charting and reporting templates talk to each other — you can control what fields copy from one form to another, making it very easy to create a one-click pediatrician report. When I landed on IntakeQ several years ago, I basically felt like it did everything I needed it to do and the price point felt appropriate. Sure, it didn’t handle scheduling as well as Acuity, or have as pretty an interface as Jane, or have a face sheet as useful as ChARM‘s — but I’ll never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I’ve run my practice on IntakeQ + Spruce for secure messaging and client communications, and that combination has worked mostly well since 2019.

Jane and Practice Better are geared toward wellness providers and are very well suited for lactation purposes.

Simple Practice is designed primarily for behavioral health. They do have lactation templates prebuilt in the system that you can also modify and refine. They’re not how I would build them, but they didn’t ask me — and these seem fine!

Jotform is not a traditional EHR at all — it’s a form builder. Jotform explicitly states in its own BAA that it “is not an electronic health record or other medical record system and should not be used to maintain a Designated Record Set or relied upon directly to provide patient care.” That said, it’s an extremely powerful and flexible tool for building intake forms, consents, and care plan delivery workflows, and some practitioners use it as part of a larger DIY system alongside Google Workspace or Office 365. If you want total control over every field in every form and are willing to build your own workflow around it, Jotform is worth exploring. Just know going in that you’re building a system, not adopting one.

Kalix is a fully customizable EMR built specifically for allied health professionals — dietitians, nutritionists, and similar practitioners. IBCLCs fit squarely in that category. It includes customizable templates, online scheduling, telehealth, secure messaging, e-faxing, and billing, plus its own built-in clearinghouse. If I were starting over now or if I was still just a solo practitioner, I might choose Kalix — but the workflow is different enough from IntakeQ that the transition would be too challenging for my employees. I haven’t closed the door yet, and I’ll update this post when I do.

CarePatron is a newer entrant (launched 2021) that positions itself as an all-in-one healthcare workspace — scheduling, EHR, telehealth, billing, and secure messaging under one login. It has customizable templates, though the library skews heavily toward mental health and general healthcare rather than allied health or lactation specifically. Its headline feature is an extremely accessible free plan, which makes it genuinely easy to test before committing to anything. I haven’t put it through its paces for lactation charting yet, but the price point and the free entry tier make it worth mentioning.

Google Workspace is a completely DIY solution. It’s low cost, but requires you to do all the account maintenance and management yourself.

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Client Intake Experience

With almost all of these platforms, your clients will log in to a secure client portal to book appointments, complete intake forms, and sign consents. IntakeQ has a feature where you can ask a client to modify their form after they’ve submitted it, which is genuinely useful.

I’ve personally used IntakeQ, Jane, and Practice Better as a patient and found them all to be pretty easy to use.

Jotform‘s intake experience is entirely form-based — clients receive a link to a form rather than logging into a portal. For clients, this is actually very low-friction, which is an advantage for compliance. The tradeoff is that you’ll need to manually transfer that information into whatever system you’re using for ongoing charting.

Using Google Workspace or Office 365, you can create a link to an intake form that’s easy to send by email. Results can be viewed individually or tabulated into a spreadsheet.

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Integrated Online Scheduling

This is where platforms diverge pretty dramatically, and where I’ve had the most opinions over the years.

Jane‘s online scheduler is the most beautiful and user-friendly on this list. It looks great embedded in a website and is truly mobile-responsive. Simple Practice has a very clean scheduler as well.

Acuity isn’t an EHR, but it’s worth mentioning specifically because a number of the platforms in this post work very well alongside it as your scheduling solution. If your chosen EHR doesn’t have the scheduling features you want, Acuity can fill that gap — it handles appointment categories, time padding, coupons, packages, and embeds cleanly on any website. Prior to switching to IntakeQ, I used both MLC and ChARM for charting with Acuity for scheduling, and while managing two platforms is never as seamless as having everything in one place, that combination gives you a lot of power and flexibility. Acuity also integrates with Zoom, so you can handle telehealth booking through it as well. Note that only the highest-level Acuity plan is HIPAA compliant.

IntakeQ‘s embeddable scheduler has many of the same features Acuity does — appointment categories, padding, coupons, and packages.

Practice Better has a solid online scheduler — not quite as feature-rich as Acuity or IntakeQ, but straightforward and easy for clients. It can be embedded in your website.

Kalix includes online scheduling via your own website, with automated appointment reminders by text, voice, and email.

ChARM‘s online scheduling has improved over the years, and they are now offering an AI chatbot integration specifically for scheduling. I doubt AI could handle the complexity of home visits in New York City, but for a single-location clinic it could work!

CarePatron has online scheduling with client self-booking and syncs with Google Calendar and Outlook.

You won’t get true integrated scheduling with Google Workspace, Office 365, or Jotform — but Acuity can serve any of those platforms well. Jotform does connect with Google Calendar and Microsoft Office, both of which have rudimentary scheduling features that are more suited to grabbing 15 minutes with Casey from HR than to having clients self-schedule lactation consults.

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Secure Messaging

For a full breakdown of secure messaging options for lactation private practice, see my post on secure messaging.

Most of the platforms in this post integrate secure messaging directly. Google Workspace, Office 365, and Jotform require a separate solution — Spruce is great for that. CarePatron includes built-in secure messaging.

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Clickable Links in Care Plans

When you create a care plan in Google Workspace, Office 365, ChARM, Practice Better, Jane, Kalix, or Simple Practice, you’ll be able to share a version with the client that has clickable URLs.

IntakeQ, Kalix, and Practice Better will let you create patient/client resources that are easy to share and support embedded links and videos. Theoretically you can do this with Google Workspace and Office 365 and even make them pretty if you’ve got the graphic design skills. That is way too much work for me.

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Insurance Billing and Claim Tracking

At this point in the timeline of software development, integration with an insurance claims clearinghouse is pretty much a given. I would not make your clearinghouse a dealbreaker for choosing a charting platform, because in my opinion they are all annoying to set up and use, and they’ll all cost you money — so go with the easiest possible option.

I hate Office Ally because they charge me per provider any month our claims to United Healthcare and Anthem go above 50%, which is every single month. I switched to Trizetto, which is saving me money on that end. If I switched to Jane, Kalix, or ChARM I’d be able to keep Trizetto. But Practice Better only uses ClaimMD.

With Google Workspace and Office 365, you’ll need to manage claims and payments outside the platform. Jotform can generate superbills and CMS-1500 forms if you build the templates, but it’s not a billing platform. CarePatron has basic billing and charges per submitted claim (roughly $0.19–$0.25 per claim depending on volume), which is a different model from most platforms — worth factoring in if you’re doing meaningful in-network volume.

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Integrated Payment Processing

At this point, all robust platforms allow for some kind of online payments, and this is not a feature I would let be a dealbreaker. That said, there have been a lot of complaints about the payment company IntakeQ uses (Stax). I haven’t had any problems myself.

ChARM, Jane, and Practice Better also have their own native processors. Practice Better will also let you connect with Square. Kalix integrates with Stripe and Square. CarePatron has online payment processing built in.

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Growth Charts

If you’re tracking infant weights across visits, this section matters to you. Not every platform handles it well.

ChARM has built-in WHO growth charts. They’re limited in detail but easy to see at a glance — one of the things I genuinely like about ChARM‘s clinical interface.

IntakeQ incorporates WHO growth charts and the visual graph can be replicated for multiple visits and autopopulated in different report types. This is one of IntakeQ‘s strengths for lactation charting specifically. Unfortunately, they don’t support preterm babies and the percentiles are hard to read.

Kalix has integrated growth charts, which I haven’t tested yet.

For the platforms that don’t have built-in growth charts — Jane, Practice Better, Simple Practice, Google Workspace, Office 365, Jotform, and CarePatron — you’ll need an external app. Growth is the one I most commonly see IBCLCs using for this.

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Telehealth

ChARM, Practice Better, Jane, IntakeQ/PracticeQ, Simple Practice, Kalix, and CarePatron all offer telehealth integrations. Just make sure you’ve got the HIPAA-compliant version of Zoom, or use the platform’s native video. They all work more or less the same.

If you’re using Google Workspace, you have access to Google Meet, which you can launch directly from your calendar or email.

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Pricing

Google Workspace is highly affordable, starting at $7/user/month, and all levels are HIPAA compliant. There are additional features you can pay more for, but it’s worth noting that Google Gemini is not covered by the BAA.

Office 365 is similarly affordable, and all levels are HIPAA compliant. Their AI tool, Copilot, is only covered under the BAA at the enterprise level.

ChARM is free for up to 50 encounters per month, $0.50/encounter after that. You’ll pay à la carte for premium features like AI scribing, integrated fax, two-way texting, insurance billing, and others. If you are a high-volume practice with a lot of providers, the costs can add up — their fixed pricing plan is $200/provider/month, which puts it out of reach for non-physician practices.

IntakeQ / PracticeQ — plans start at $84.90/month, with additional providers at $30 each and unlimited admins. They recently rolled out a patient engagement feature for an additional $110/month. I wish I could make it work for us, but it’s really set up for locations that are independently staffed. We have a lot of locations because of how complicated home visits in NYC are — and on the back end, this made it unusable for us.

Kalix — $27/month for unlimited clients without telehealth, $47/month with telehealth included. Add the built-in clearinghouse for $15/month extra.

Simple Practice — requires at least $79/month for customizable charting templates. You’ll need higher-tier pricing for a group practice, with additional providers at $74/month and admins at $39/month.

Practice Better — plans range from $25/month for up to 10 active clients to $99/month for full features and unlimited clients. Team pricing is $155/month for two providers, with additional providers at $50 each.

Jane — ranges from $54–$79/month depending on how much functionality you need. The AI scribe is $15/month per provider, and insurance billing is another $20/month on top of a required ClaimMD subscription.

Jotform — requires the Gold plan for HIPAA compliance, which is $64.50/month with annual pricing. Keep in mind that Jotform is a form builder, not an EHR — at this price point you’d likely be using it alongside another platform. Add that to your total cost before comparing.

CarePatron — this one is genuinely unusual: there’s a free plan (unlimited clients, core scheduling, telehealth, and live chat support) that you can stay on indefinitely. Paid plans run $29–$49/month and add AI scribing, additional storage, and more advanced features. The free tier makes it very easy to test before committing, which I appreciate. Insurance billing is usage-based rather than a flat monthly fee.

If you’re ready to go paperless but think you might platform-hop as you figure out what you like, the Lactation Private Practice Essential Toolkit gives you access to all the lactation-specific templates I’ve made for the platforms that allow template import, plus attorney-reviewed legal forms and a lot more.

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Group Practices

Most of this post is written with the solo practitioner in mind. If you’re running a group practice — or planning to grow into one — the platform decision gets more complicated quickly. A platform that’s affordable for one provider can become your biggest software line item once you have a team.

The key variable is the pricing model. Platforms price group tiers in very different ways:

Per-provider pricing means your costs scale directly with headcount. The cost per additional provider varies, but for my purposes with 8 providers I’m paying a few hundred dollars a month regardless of which platform I’m on.

Encounter-based pricing like ChARM‘s ($0.50/encounter after 50 free per month) can be surprisingly favorable for group practices, because you’re paying for volume of work rather than number of providers. A group generating 400 encounters a month pays $175 — far less than many per-provider alternatives.

Kalix’s group pricing is interesting — you pay based on the number of appointment hours your team uses each week. This could be a great option if you have a predictable schedule and can forecast the cost accurately.

Here’s what I pay for my practice of 10 providers and several admins and interns, compared to what I would pay on a different platform:

• IntakeQ: $354.90 + around $20/month in fax credits. They integrate with Heidi for AI, which is $110/user/month for the integrable version. No thank you.
• Practice Better: $555 (though I haven’t inquired about a volume discount) — plus paying per fax and per text, and around $100/month for their AI scribe.
• Jane: $369/month, plus another $150/month if I used their integrated AI scribing.
• Kalix: I estimate around $450/month, and that would include AI scribing.
• ChARM: $2,000/month. To start! Yeesh!

Beyond pricing, several features matter much more in a group context:

User roles and permissions. Can you give providers access to only their own clients? Can your admin access scheduling without accessing clinical notes? Can Pathway 3 interns be set up with supervised access? Not every platform handles this gracefully — and basically, this is what you’re really paying the big money for. The less you’re paying, the less control you’ll have over access.

Multi-provider scheduling. Can clients book with a specific provider, or does the scheduler only show availability by service type? If your providers have their own client bases, this matters. Really only ChARM is problematic here.

Onboarding and switching costs. When you’re solo, switching platforms is a project. When you have multiple providers and an admin, it’s a major undertaking. Factor in the disruption cost, not just the monthly fee. If providers have a hard time learning the new platform, they won’t be able to see as many clients.

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Help me choose!

I wish I could pick your platform for you. I’ve been doing this for over fifteen years and I still don’t think there’s a single platform that’s obviously right for everyone. The decision is deeply personal — it depends on your volume, your billing situation, your tolerance for DIY, your budget, and honestly, your aesthetic. I hope this post has helped you think through what matters most to you.

For a granular, side-by-side comparison with even more features assessed, check out my free comparison chart.

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A note on MilkNotes and Mobile Lactation Consultant

MilkNotes and Mobile Lactation Consultant are the two lactation-specific platforms I haven’t covered in the main post — they come with pre-built templates designed specifically for our work. If you want something that’s ready to go out of the box, these are your options. The tradeoff is that neither one is fully customizable in the way the other platforms in this post are, which is why I haven’t spent a lot of time on them here. That’s not a knock on either platform — it’s just a different approach to the problem. If you know you want lactation-specific templates and don’t want to build your own workflow, they’re absolutely worth exploring. I have training modules for both if you end up going that route — check out the Lactation Private Practice Essential Toolkit.