Practice Better alternatives for insurance billing
Duo Practice, in short
- What it is
- Duo Practice is a free EHR with insurance billing built in. It drafts the note and the claim from the visit, files the claim under your NPI once you approve it, matches the payment and explains denials.
- Who it's for
- Independent registered dietitians who bill insurance.
- Price
- The chart is free. Billing is 3.9% of what the insurer pays on each claim, with no monthly fee, so a claim paid $0 costs $0. You pay Claim.MD directly for your own clearinghouse plan.
- How it differs
- Practice Better, Healthie and SimplePractice give you claim tools and leave the claim work to you. Duo Practice does that work, and it can run on top of the EHR you already use.
By Javier Alvarez · Updated · 4 min read
| Practice Better plans | Free (3 clients), Starter $35/mo, Professional $69/mo, Plus $99/mo, Team $155/mo, billed monthly |
|---|---|
| Practice Better claims | Through its Claim.MD integration, with your own Claim.MD account |
| Practice Better AI notes | Add-on, from $10/mo per practitioner |
| Duo Practice | Free chart; 3.9% of what the insurer pays on each claim, no monthly fee |
| Keep Practice Better? | Yes: Duo imports clients and insurance and writes nothing back |
| Prices checked | October 13, 2026 (Practice Better, Healthie, SimplePractice) |
Disclosure: Duo Practice is one of the options below, and we wrote this page. Practice Better is genuinely good at what it was built for, and for plenty of practices the right answer is to stay put. Competitor prices come from their own pricing pages, on the dates shown.
You picked Practice Better because it made your practice feel professional: a client portal people actually use, programs, protocols, intake flows that just work. Then insurance became a bigger share of your revenue, and a new kind of work showed up: eligibility checks, unit math, claim statuses, ERAs and denials. The software watches you do that work instead of doing it.
That is the real shape of this decision. Practice Better didn't get worse; your practice changed underneath it.
Where Practice Better wins
- Programs and protocols. Drip content, group programs, supplement protocols and packages. If your model is coaching relationships, few tools do it better.
- The client experience. A clean, mobile-friendly portal with messaging, journals, food logs and document sharing.
- Forms and automations around the client journey: intake, waivers, reminders.
- A free plan for up to 3 clients (how it stacks up against other free EHRs for dietitians), and a Team plan that includes free migration.
If you are mostly cash-pay, you can stop reading. You are in the right place already.
Where insurance-heavy practices feel the gap
Practice Better supports superbills, and through its Claim.MD integration you can check eligibility, submit claims, track status and see ERAs. What stays with you is the judgment work: picking CPT and ICD-10 codes, counting units from the session time, reading each adjustment code and fixing what was denied. We walk through exactly which steps stay manual in Practice Better + Claim.MD: what's automated, what's manual.
Same visit, both workflows
The alternatives, side by side
| Practice Better | Duo Practice | Healthie | SimplePractice | Kalix | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built around | Client experience, programs | Doing the billing work | Full platform with an API | General private practice | Dietitian-specific EHR |
| Chart, billed monthly | Free (3 clients), then from $35/mo | $0 | From $19.99/mo | From $49/mo | See vendor |
| AI notes | Add-on, from $10/mo | Included | Add-on, $35/mo (Plus plan and up) | Add-on, $35/mo | See vendor |
| Insurance claims | Through your own Claim.MD plan | 3.9% of what the insurer pays, plus your Claim.MD plan | ClaimMD integration from $30/mo | $0.39 per claim | Claims support built for MNT |
| Who does the claim work | You | Duo Practice; you approve | You | You | You |
| Best fit | Cash-pay and hybrid coaching practices | Insurance-based RDs who want the admin done | Groups and teams building on an API | Multi-disciplinary practices | Solo RDs who want RD-native records |
Practice Better, Healthie and SimplePractice prices were checked on their own pricing pages on October 13, 2026; SimplePractice's per-claim fee is from its October 1, 2026 pricing change notice. Kalix doesn't publish the same line items, so we left those cells to them. For deeper dives: Practice Better vs Healthie, Healthie alternatives, our SimplePractice review for dietitians and Kalix alternatives.
Option zero: keep Practice Better, add the billing
Duo Practice works on top of Practice Better. You paste your Practice Better API keys, your clients and their insurance come over, and nothing is written back. Keep Practice Better for programs and the portal; Duo handles the claims for 3.9% of what the insurer pays, with no monthly fee. How that billing works, and what it costs on your own numbers, is on our dietitian billing service page.
If you do switch: plan these four things
- Data export. Pull your client list, documents and notes out of Practice Better before you commit anywhere. Forms, program content and automations rarely transfer.
- Billing continuity. Keep working claims already submitted through the old workflow until they are paid. Timely filing limits don't pause for your migration.
- Client transition. New clients start on the new platform; active clients move in batches with a short heads-up. Budget for a month of running both.
- A test batch. Run 3 to 5 real clients end to end, intake to claim to payment, and confirm the money lands.
Which one fits your practice
- Mostly cash-pay, programs and packages: stay with Practice Better.
- Hybrid, growing insurance share, want one flexible platform: Healthie.
- Multi-disciplinary practice, or you share admin with therapists: SimplePractice.
- Solo RD who wants nutrition-native records with claims support: Kalix.
- Insurance is the engine and the admin hours are the problem: keep Practice Better and add Duo Practice, or move to Duo entirely. Either way, start with the dietitian insurance billing guide so you know which steps you are handing off.
Whichever way you lean, take the trials and test the boring parts. Anyone can demo a pretty portal. Run a real claim through.