Different by design
As a modern therapist, you have a lot of different EHRs to choose from. We're quite a bit different than the rest! Here is how.
As a modern therapist, you have a lot of different EHRs to choose from. We're quite a bit different than the rest! Here is how.
The market is already littered with tools to help you run your private practice. Unfortunately, most of these tools are the same. They have uninspired designs, clunky interfaces, and no driving philosophy. They're just a collection of features that barely fit together.
We've redesigned the EHR around an original, new philosophy called The Picnic Way. With novel workflows, a fresh point of view, and an utter commitment to simplicity, we've built PracticePicnic to be like no other EHR you've seen before.
Below, you'll find a list of things we hold dear. These are the promises we make to you and the principles we use to guide our product. The rest of the market is aimlessly slapping features together, but not us. Here's what we believe. Here's what matters to us.
We're not here to make a quick buck. We're here to offer a great product, and charge a fair price for it. We like to keep things simple. Our prices are always going to be transparent, and we'll never try to upsell you things you don't need. We're a small business ourselves, so we know how annoying it is to be nickel-and-dimed. We're not going to do that to you. We simply want to provide an excellent good at an honest price.
Trusting software businesses is harder today than it has ever been. A new company will pop up, only to disappear a few years later, collapsing financially or being acquired by a larger company. We absolutely hate this trend. That's why we're a completely self-funded company. We haven't raised a single dollar from venture capitalists, and we don't ever plan to. That means there is no investor pressure to make short-sighted decisions. We promise to only make decisions that prioritize the long term sustainability of the company.
Everyone is talking about AI right now. While we think the advances in recent years are impressive and promising for the future, we're not interested in blindly applying them without understanding their consequences. That goes for AI, Crypto, Blockchain, and any other trend that comes along. Unlike many other players in the tech world, we're going to invest in the things that won't change, the stable, proven tools that we know for a fact, provide high value and are likely to still be around in 10 years.
Our founder has worked in cybersecurity for many years, and has started a successful privacy-oriented company in the past. Today, our data is one of the most important assets we have. Examples of irresponsible tech companies mishandling sensitive user data are everywhere. Every feature we build, every decision we make, is done with security and privacy in mind. This might mean that we take a little longer than others to build new features, but we think the tradeoff is worth it. Better to build something right, than to build it fast and insecure.
Cliche? Maybe. But we really mean it. We've invested a lot of resources into the things our users care about most: user experience, customer support, and reliability. We promise to treat you like a human, not a number on a spreadsheet like most other companies do. We promise to act with integrity, and to always do what we believe to be right. We promise to listen to your feedback, and to build the features that will help improve your life. We promise to put you first.
We hate clunky software. We're not interested in building software that barely does what you need, all the while being incredibly unpleasant to use. We're interested in building software is an absolute joy to use. Features should be designed with user experience and ease of use in mind, not to check a box on a list. Each feature in PracticePicnic has been carefully designed, and thought through, and each future feature will be as well.
We don't just care about what we're doing, we also care about how we're doing it. Whether it's the product we're building or the customer service we're providing, the process we're following is as important to us as the end result. We're not going to take software engineering shortcuts on things that require careful attention just to rush a feature out the door. We're not going to respond to our customer questions with unhelpful automated messages, or copy-and-pasted responses just to cut costs. We're going to do our best to do things the right way.
We're a small business that's trying to make our tiny corner of the world better. Unlike other tech companies (especially those backed by venture capital), we're not trying to dominate the world of healthcare or become a monopoly. As the company grows, we'd like to proportionally grow our impact on the larger industry, but we're going to take things one step at a time. Right now, we're just trying to make the lives of our users within our tiny niche a little bit better.
As a business, it's easy to get caught up in only thinking about the bottom line. We are a for-profit venture, so there is no getting around the fact that our profits are important to us. But we constantly remind ourselves that we started this company primarily to make the world a better place through software. Being profitable is a means to that end, not the end itself. We're going to do our best to not lose sight of that.
We care about the impact our work has on the world. We'd like our product to make the world better, not worse. This means that we're going to try to be as ethical as we can in all of our business practices. We're not interested in predatory pricing strategies, using dark patterns to trick users, selling private user data, lying to our customers, or any other unethical business behavior. We understand that what is and is not ethical is always hard to define, but know that we're going to do our best to think through the consequences of our actions, and to act in a way that we believe to be ethical.