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Modern Therapist’s Consumer Guide: SimplePractice

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Modern Therapist’s Consumer Guide: SimplePractice

Curt and Katie talk with Jonathan Seltzer, CEO of SimplePractice, about how the platform supports independent and group practice clinicians. Jonathan discusses SimplePractice’s mission to empower therapists with intuitive tools, transparency around investors and AI development, and his team’s commitment to independence, innovation, and clinical integrity.

This episode is part of our Modern Therapist’s Consumer Guide series, where we explore innovative tools and services built for therapists and their clients.

Transcript

Click here to scroll to the podcast transcript.

Interview with Jonathan Seltzer, CEO of SimplePractice

About Our Guest: Jonathan Seltzer

Jonathan Seltzer is the CEO of SimplePractice, a software platform built to empower private practice clinicians to run thriving, independent practices. He leads a team of more than 550 professionals who are passionate about helping mental health clinicians make running a successful private practice—whether full-time, part-time, or as a group practice—a reality. Today, more than 225,000 clinicians provide care using SimplePractice.

Jonathan is deeply committed to building software that not only eases the burden of managing a private practice, but also connects independent practitioners to the broader healthcare ecosystem. He believes solo and small-group providers are essential to the future of mental healthcare, and that the right tools can help them operate with greater confidence and impact in their communities.

He began working with SimplePractice in 2019, bringing years of leadership experience across operations, strategy, and finance. Jonathan supports his team and customers from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his young family and getting outdoors—especially on a Minnesota lake, whether frozen or not.

In this podcast episode: Supporting Therapists Through Software and Innovation

Curt and Katie talk with Jonathan Seltzer about how SimplePractice continues to evolve to meet the needs of independent mental health professionals. Jonathan shares insights about the company’s origins, philosophy, and roadmap—from simplifying billing and insurance to addressing clinician concerns about data, investors, and artificial intelligence.

“Our software gives clinicians choice and the opportunity to operate in a practice setting that they choose, which is really powerful.”
— Jonathan Seltzer, CEO of SimplePractice (2:30)

Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction
1:56 – Who is Jonathan Seltzer and what SimplePractice does
2:30 – How SimplePractice began and evolved
6:21 – Mission, vision, and values behind the company
10:26 – Addressing concerns about investors and company growth
13:24 – Aligning investors with the mission of empowering independent clinicians
18:45 – The changing landscape of private practice and emerging threats
24:21 – How SimplePractice is helping clinicians with referrals and insurance
32:33 – Measurement-based care and future of value-based reimbursement
36:14 – AI development, ethical standards, and clinical integrity
45:21 – Data privacy and responding to clinicians’ fears about AI
49:43 – Upcoming features and roadmap highlights
53:11 – How to start a SimplePractice free trial
54:06 – Who SimplePractice is for
1:00:06 – Curt and Katie Chat – Our Review of SimplePractice

“We’re spending more and more time making sure AI is practitioner-centered, built to augment—not replace—clinicians, with the highest clinical and ethical standards.”
— Jonathan Seltzer, CEO of SimplePractice (36:14)

Curt and Katie Chat – Our Review of SimplePractice

Curt and Katie reflect on their longtime experiences using SimplePractice and their renewed partnership with the company. They discuss its intuitive features, AI tools, and ongoing improvements to serve both solo and group practices.

Katie notes how the platform simplifies documentation and practice management while supporting sustainable private practice. Curt highlights transparency and responsiveness from SimplePractice leadership and their shared values around empowering clinicians and ethical technology use.

Special Offer for Modern Therapist Listeners

Check out current SimplePractice offers at simplepractice.com.

Relevant Links

Website: simplepractice.com
Email: jonathan.s@simplepractice.com
Social Media: LinkedIn | Instagram

Relevant Episodes of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide

Episodes we mention or related episodes from our archive at mtsgpodcast.com

Transparency Note

This episode is part of our Modern Therapist’s Consumer Guide series, where we interview companies to help therapists make informed decisions about tools and services that support their work. While this interview is a paid partnership, our discussion and opinions are our own.

Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy

Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Katie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

A Quick Note:

Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.

Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.

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Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:

Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:15
Welcome back modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Consumer Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is one of our extra episodes where we talk about the companies that we partner with, the background work that we’ve done, and highlight some of the places that Katie and I feel that we can trust in the work that we do, and we are super excited, once again, to be partnering with SimplePractice. We had done one of these episodes years ago with Howard Spector, who was one of the masterminds behind the very origins of SimplePractice. And Howard has continued to go on and do very wonderful Howard things. And as we continue to partner up with SimplePractice and look at all of the wonderful things that they’re doing, we get to work with lots of people from various aspects of the company, and today, we are joined by Jonathan Seltzer to help us talk about where SimplePractice is these days. And just super excited to have you on the podcast here. So thank you very much for joining us.

Jonathan Seltzer 1:25
No, thanks, thanks for having me. It’s wonderful to be here.

Katie Vernoy 1:29
I’m really excited for this conversation, because you and I have had many different conversations about a lot of these pieces, and I think there’s more that the SimplePractice customers and our profession as a whole want to hear from you, and so we get to do the questions, and we get to have the conversation. But before we do that, I want to ask you the question that we ask all of our guests, which is, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

Jonathan Seltzer 1:55
Oh, I’m Jonathan Seltzer, father, a spouse. Hail from Minnesota, but I find myself humbly leading a software company that is making it easier. Our hope is to make it easier to practice mental health as an independent clinician, and I’m super passionate about that.

Curt Widhalm 2:19
Can you give us a brief background on how and why SimplePractice was created and how it’s evolved over the years, and basically where is SimplePractice now?

Jonathan Seltzer 2:30
Such an incredible story. Two founders, Howard Spector, Ralph Zimmerman, Howard, psychologist; Ralph Zimmerman, technologist. As Howard was looking for software to run his practice on, store medical records, a calendar, essentially billing, scheduling billing and a place to store records, saw that there was nothing out there built for solo mental health clinicians. Partnered with Ralph, and they built a beautiful piece of software that it’s in our name is simple, intuitive and really more than got the ball rolling in terms of, you know, providing a modern, cost effective solution to enable therapists to start a practice, whether it’s part time, full time, and then today, we have 1000s of group practices running on on SimplePractice as well. The core mission still stays true, which is our software gives clinicians choice and the opportunity to operate in a practice setting that that they choose, which is really powerful. When we think about more than a million mental health clinicians in the United States, two thirds of them are operating as either solo or small groups. And if you talk to aspiring clinicians in school, to those that are practicing today, I’m always amazed by private practice is still, you know, a top destination of choice depending on a clinician’s journey, whether that is later in career, maybe mid career, part time to augment income, or partner with a smaller group in the community in which they’re serving. And SimplePractice takes that very seriously in terms of, how do we continue to invest and evolve to make, you know, continue to make that a reality. And because the the reality is, is, if we think about the landscape of outpatient healthcare, most of healthcare has been consolidated as we think about primary care, to to PT to dialysis labs, you name it. And mental health is is really the last segment that independent, solo and small groups are the vast majority. And I think when you talk to physicians and practitioners and in other segments, many long for the independence that mental health clinicians have, and especially just in terms of who do they practice with, who do they collaborate with, who do they contract with. And maintaining that control and that clinical control over their practice is really, really important to practitioners and physicians, and we hope to continue to build on what Howard and Ralph started back in 2012.

Katie Vernoy 5:29
I want to dig into that conversation about the landscape in a little bit, because I think there’s a lot there. And I think one of the questions that we typically ask in these consumer guide episodes, digs further into the more philosophy part of mission, vision and values. And so if you can talk to that first, and then we’re going to dig into the crazy landscape that SimplePractice finds itself in. And as a warrior for individual and small group practices, it’s quite nice to have you here with us. But if you can talk through what mission, vision and values guide your business, your business decisions, because I think that helps to place you in a philosophy that I think, honestly, in my experience, aligns with our profession pretty well, and how I sit within it.

Jonathan Seltzer 6:21
Mission, more than 500 teammates and everyone is really bound by this idea of: how do we continue to build software to empower independent mental health, underscored mental health clinicians to thrive? And what that really means is giving mental health clinicians the tools to remain independent and autonomous and have the opportunity to continue to choose where they want to practice mental health care. And that’s something that it’s simple, in many ways easy to say, but if you were to join a company wide meeting or a product roadmap review or any sort of company function, the benefit is, is that we’re focused on mental health, which allows us to go deeper and deeper on that problem set for independent clinicians, and as we can probably get into more and more of SimplePractice needs to play more of a role with making it easier to work with insurance, or making it easier to collaborate with non mental health clinicians as we think about referrals from primary care to mental health, or maybe an inpatient center to outpatient a SimplePractice customer. And the values around that for us as a company, and I think about values as what values do we need to unlock that mission? And some will stay true sort of indefinitely, but then some will change too, as the company grows and as we what do we need in terms of our culture and values to get after that that mission? And you know, core to it is around simplicity. It’s in our name, but that is something that, not only in our name, but, you know, Howard and Ralph got it right from the start, is that if a therapist can’t start SimplePractice via a self serve trial and get to that “aha!” moment on their own. It’s not simple, and it’s not intuitive. The challenge, obviously, is that it’s, you know, as we’re now over 10 years old, and you add more and more features or evolve workflows, it’s like any sort of foundation you need to, you know, have that right mix of, how are you, you know, getting after levels of product debt, where maybe we need to get into some of the foundation of the workflow that was something that was built 10 years ago. Like top of mind is around billing for us right now, while at the same time, you know, thinking through is as we add new new features, and whether it’s around insurance verification referrals to everything that we’re thinking about around AI, how does it fit into a one cohesive platform that therapists can navigate based on what they’re trying to accomplish? Again, part time, full time, individuals to group practices that have very different demands than an individual clinician.

Katie Vernoy 9:22
When you’re talking, I’m hearing very clinician focused: How do we make this as easy as possible for clinicians? How do we continue to help them make their decisions as independent or small group practices? And yet, when I go into therapist’s Facebook groups or those types of things, if we want to listen to them, they say that SimplePractice’s value is, you know, corporate greed, or there’s this element of, you know, we’ve got investors, or we have this or that. And I, I want to just maybe touch on there a little bit of of how you respond to that, because when we’ve had conversations, that’s not how I experience you, but you do. You are a big company at this point. You are a concern that that has investors and those types of things. And I think that mission and vision and value sometimes feels like but what about your investors? What about the return on investment? What about selling all our data and making AI therapy bots? You know, there’s, there’s a lot that I think clinicians really worry about, as SimplePractice has been so successful.

Jonathan Seltzer 10:26
Yeah, there’s, there’s a lot to unpack and that. But I think it’s a really important question. I guess, obviously aware of voices in in the community, and very much respect that. I guess I come at that from a position of the larger we get, and each day that we add another therapist, our obligation becomes bigger and bigger. And while it disappoints me and makes me sad, and I’d love all 240,000 clinicians cheering us on that how we connect with our customers and community via actions in the software, via our messaging and via like our role is to again point back to mission of independence and autonomy and be an all in one software that gives clinicians confidence in the type of practice that they’re running, so that they can focus on their very mission oriented individuals in terms of providing, you know, mental health care at a time that it’s it’s really needed, needed most. You know, as we think about it, we have investors. We’ve had investors well before my time. Which investors, as we think about it, play a really good role in the world, which is backing ideas that can make a positive impact on individuals in society. And we took institutional dollars from very reputable investors. And when you do that, you then have, you know, in some ways, you’re serving, you know, two important stakeholders, or three, I think about as three important stakeholders, which is my team at SimplePractice, my customers at SimplePractice, and our investors. And there will be periods that you know, we’re really fortunate that we’re a highly profitable company, and so every dollar can be reinvested, and we aren’t reliant upon needing to raise additional venture dollars, unlike many other companies within the mental health space today. But then at the same time, I have stakeholders that are looking to make a return on their investment, because they have stakeholders like pension funds and the retirement of, you know, federal workers, et cetera. So I would say Katie, that it’s one of those things that, as you know, I we wish it would be black or white. And you know, sometimes, as a leader, you need to figure out, how do you make a call that isn’t going to satisfy necessarily all three stakeholders, but, you know, still continues to allow you to advance sort of business purpose and mission.

Curt Widhalm 13:11
How do you go about looking at who invests and how they align with what the services of the mental health community, the practitioners and how that all fits within SimplePractice’s approach?

Jonathan Seltzer 13:25
Well, if you think about it from an investor lens, SimplePractice has a lot of positive attributes in terms of operating in a very large segment, as I mentioned, more than a million practitioners. It’s a segment also that has a lot of demand, unfortunately, and I also say fortunately, as mental health continues to be destigmatized, there is more and more client and patient demand for mental health services. And from an investor perspective, that that makes for an exciting opportunity to back that. And to your point on mission alignment, for years now, if you were to look at any of our investor decks, is all about enabling private practice mental health clinicians to thrive, and supporting that autonomy and independence, and really the backing of small businesses, small practices, and living in a an era where software is getting less and less expensive to create so that we can make it more of a reality. Our investors are very excited by that mission and opportunity, and especially as we delve further into insurance and making insurance easier for independent clinicians to work with, and there’s that’s probably a whole nother thread to talk through in terms of what do we mean by that, but a just way too much administrative time being spent working with insurance still just, you know, roughly half of our practitioners are 100% cash pay, and we don’t blame them for that, given the amount of time that it takes to work with insurance. But then, on the flip side, what that means, and from a big picture standpoint, is as demand for mental health continues to increase, those that are getting access to care are those that you know have an ability to pay out of pocket. And then the last piece that our investors are really excited about and aligned with is that, I say team, if we’re actually successful at helping the market of independent clinicians stay fragmented and solo or small group, they’re really hard to get in touch with. Like, whether, you know, and you just, I mean, anyone who goes to a primary care office and you know, as part of an annual physical and expresses some aspect of need, or from a mental health standpoint, there’s no digital way to refer, and there’s certainly very few ways for into there’s, I mean, there’s, there’s no ecosystem to support patient record sharing and collaboration that is needed to help integrate. And so we’re really excited by continuing to build software, because I think that to build that promise, or unlock that promise of independence and autonomy, we have to build other safe, transparent data layers to be able to enable mental health to actually integrate into the broader healthcare system. And so I know we’re moving away from the investor question, but so happy to stay, stay there, but I guess I’d finish on the investor piece with our investor base will continue to change as, you know, hopefully we make them a good return on investment, and the only way that we’re going to make them a good return on investment is by adding 1000s of more clinicians and making these core you know, areas of focus come true within within the product that leads to customer growth, customer retention, customer satisfaction, and then unlocking more value of mental health across what you know, I would consider the healthcare supply chain.

Katie Vernoy 17:15
So to summarize, it sounds like, in finding investors, in vetting investors and determining whether or not they’re aligned, you’re sharing this vision of the solution that you’re providing, where independent practitioners can communicate through referrals, they can have all of their business processes very simple and easy to use, having potentially an opportunity to compete within the insurance market and those types of things, and so we’re already starting to talk about solutions. I want to step back, because we’ve had a number of conversations about this over the years, and you and I, you know, we reconnected at the behavioral health tech conference last year, and definitely this was heavy on people’s minds, but the landscape in mental health is changing, and it sounds like SimplePractice is staying very abreast of that. And we don’t need to go into depth here, but what do you see as the current threats and opportunities for therapists in the marketplace, and how are clinicians potentially you know, SimplePractice customers are, how are they taking advantage of technology or other solutions to stay competitive? Because, you know, just to mention a few, AI big, you know, Alma Rula insurance based, kind of companies, it seems like there’s a lot that clinicians are fighting against, even that consolidation that you were talking about earlier. And so what do you see as the biggest threats and opportunities that SimplePractice is kind of tapping into right now?

Jonathan Seltzer 18:45
Couple things. Number one would be, is that we see a big threat on practitioner volume. So we have the benefit of 240,000 clinicians, and we can see average appointments per clinician, and over the last couple of years, we’ve seen on average, you know, call it the rate of appointment growth slowing. And as we surveyed customers and spoke with customers, the unfortunate piece was that a lot of them were looking to continue to still grow their panel, or there was or there are group practices that are employing and adding clinicians that are looking for increased caseload. And as we took a step back, what we’ve seen is now independent clinicians are really fighting for referrals. You know where, you know, you probably both remember the days where it was start a private practice. You don’t, you probably don’t even need a website, a Psychology Today, a Psychology Today profile, maybe a booking widget from SimplePractice that allows for, you know, some level of direct scheduling and seamless intake. But the good and the bad is that there are companies that are stepping up, that are looking to go out to provide solutions to a gap between access to mental health care, just a supply and demand imbalance, and in doing so, in we we come from the lens of that independent practices now have a new competitor in a lot of these digital mental health companies that are either direct to consumer or are aggregating clinicians and contracting directly, essentially as large group practices. And so a lot of what we’re doing is we are looking to, how do we help our customers get referrals, and not just volume of referrals, but really a solid quality referral in terms of match and the type of individual that they want to most provide care for. And so number one, unfortunately, is that we see it is that independent clinicians have capacity, and there’s a mental health need and SimplePractice needs to be doing more to step up and help them fill their caseload in a manner for which they want to practice. The second big area that that we already touched on a little bit is this dynamic of, we have universal health care in the United States, more and more people, you know, our mental health is continuing to be destigmatized. You know, both at an individual level, but then you know, institutionally. Other physicians and and really people understand the power that, you know, good physical health comes with really strong mental health, and that’s leading to more and more demand. And of course, clients, patients, individuals are saying, I want to be able to pay for my mental health with my insurance benefits. So much of my my paycheck is going to to insurance. I want to be able to find a clinician that accepts my insurance. And so we see that as both, I think we’ve seen, structurally, some companies come into the landscape to make that easier through essentially services and contracting directly with payers. And then I think the other, the other piece of it is that we just have so much work to, as we talk about in internally, we want to make it as easy to accept an insurance card as it is a credit card for those that provide care on SimplePractice. We have a lot of work across that end to end journey to make that a reality. And then the third area, you know, really just over the last couple of years, is everything that’s going on with generative AI. In the last year alone, just what we’ve seen in terms of the number of individuals, and there’s been number of studies that have shown how many how consumers, are turning to the large language models for aspects of support, counseling, etc, and that has huge repercussions on the industry, and independent clinicians are fearful of: is AI going to replace me? What do I need to be learning and evolving? I’m out of school. I’ve been practicing for a number of years, and now I’m getting bombarded with AI scribes and AI this, and AI that and clients that are probably coming to sessions and saying, Hey, I talked to chat GPT about my depression, and it’s telling me this, this and this, like every physician is. And anytime, as we’ve talked about, when there’s change, and this has been really rapid change over the last 12 to 24 months, in some ways, it’s a distraction for the core service of of mental health. And so we’re trying our best to keep up from an innovation and technology standpoint, but we’re spending more and more time of how do we help our customers to educate and transparency? And you’ve that’s where you’ve probably seen a number of our live streams that we’ve had around the topic of AI, just in general, but then how we’re looking to embed it. But then at the end of the day, I think what’s probably most comforting, at least if I were a therapist, is that giving them choice of the tools that they’re using or not, and opting in and out and making sure that we’re really clear on that.

Curt Widhalm 24:22
What is it that SimplePractice is doing to help your user base be able to transition through a lot of the challenges that you’re laying out here? That it’s one thing to be able to identify, hey, there’s a lot of competition out there, but really, when a user is saying, Hey, I’m noticing my my calls are coming down. What is it that SimplePractice is doing?

Jonathan Seltzer 24:48
Show me. Yeah, I love it. Let’s, let’s, let’s start from the top, around referrals, from talking to customers. Well, number one across any of these issues, just talk to therapists or customers talk to I always tell the team, just talk to 10, and you’re probably going to get to the right, at least answer, not necessarily, how you’re going to solve it. But start there. And let’s talk about referrals. When you talk to a therapist and you say your case volume is declining, what would be a source that you would that you would be a go to source for you as an individual therapist. Nine out of 10 would say another therapist with a similar license type in my community or region that knows me and my my practice can, and, you know, essentially, can refer to me. The second usually, then, is oftentimes a primary care physician, or if they partner with substance use facilities or eating disorder clinic, or, you know, it might be an oncology department within the University of Minnesota, here. I just talked to a group practice that gets all their referrals there for cancer patients, but then also those providing care for those going through cancer treatment. And so what we launched last year, and I’m super proud of it, is clinician to clinician referrals. And so now, within the SimplePractice workflow, if I decide that XYZ client isn’t a great fit for me, I can now digitally refer it out to another SimplePractice customer within the ecosystem. And the beauty of this is no one’s paying for that referral, per se. We’re leveraging the power of, you know, in some ways, it’s an overused term for software, but the community that’s within SimplePractice. And why I love this so much is that it’s that starts to create the architecture or foundation for us to now partner with people outside of SimplePractice that our customers like to collaborate with, like a primary care physician, or I’d love to be working with some of the EMRs on the substance use and eating disorder side, to schools and universities, because what I don’t want to do is I don’t want to add more cost to the mental health landscape around competing for referrals through calling, paying for clicks and eyeballs et cetera, Which might be helpful in terms of driving volume, but from our experience with our customers is it tends to be a lower quality lead in the volume of the funnel, and we’re just not set up today to appropriately route, if we just have, you know, a lot of referrals coming in the system. The second area on referrals is that, you know, we all have probably seen the digital front doors at the payers that I said, I say, tend to be dead digital front doors where you might be able to find a pay as you know, find a provider, whether physical health or mental health. You say, Wow, this, this individual looks like a great fit for me or my child, but you’re met with call here or email here, and then oftentimes that number doesn’t work, or they’ve gone out of practice, or they aren’t even accepting any new clients or patients. And what we’ve been doing is for SimplePractice customers that opt into sharing their calendar availability and their profile. The key point there is therapists that that proactively take that step and and show that they’re open for call it more more clients we’ve seen, we’re working on direct scheduling integrations for that. We see referrals as a as a very large opportunity to not only start to move on the on the volume side of the equation, but we also see this as the architecture that’s going to allow for a longer term collaborative care model. The second piece is around insurance and billing and gosh, this is a huge topic that we could spend a ton of time on, but we’re spending a lot of time in a couple key areas. One would be is setting the claim up for success from the beginning, which then starts with appropriate insurance verification, because especially for a solo clinician or a group practice, you don’t have the staff, and our customers aren’t going to put it on the client to go verify benefits if you’re taking that exposure on on insurance. And so we’re spending a lot of time trying to improve verification of benefits, which is usually the key of any sort of a rejection or denial after service. The other key area is, how do we surface for clinicians insights around basics, around the status of the claim, if there is any sort of a rejection or edit that needs to be made, how do we proactively surface that for them and then, and and translate. This is actually where AI is pretty cool. As we’ve been testing, you can have aI translate the error or the edit that’s required that often comes back in a really foreign language that payor speak and make it really easy for a therapist to be able to make an update to a claim. And then there’s longer term opportunity where I’m really proud of our customers, this is really cool, are working with 1000s of payers. There’s obviously the you would think the top 15, top 20 payers make up 80% of our volume. They really only make up barely half. And so our customers are working with which makes sense, because our customers are everywhere, in terms of urban areas, to very remote in Duluth, Minnesota, Wyoming, Florida, Texas, etc, and there’s individual there’s, you know, payers that are very specific to those regions. And our customers, because they want to have a client panel that can use their covered benefits to pay for mental health care, they jump through a lot of hoops to work with payers in their territory. And why I bring that up is that we are spending a lot of time on not AI, but just machine learning on any time a claim is rejected or requires an edit, learning those payer rules so that we can improve what we call that we track internally, a first pass yield rate, and with our top 15 payers, we’re doing really well above a 95% first pass yield rate if the claim is set up to successfully getting paid. But that would be great if you know the top 15 payers made up 80% of our volume. So we’ve got this long tail of of smaller payers that a lot of them don’t have, have antiquated systems, etc, that we need to continue to improve that rules engine so that we can, you know, this dream of as easy as swiping a credit card for our customers, clients and patients.

Katie Vernoy 32:10
In the insurance arena, there’s also this competition around values based care and being able to show positive outcomes, those types of things. Is SimplePractice doing anything in that arena to help clinicians get higher rates, be more competitive with these larger groups, for lack of a better word.

Jonathan Seltzer 32:33
The first thing that we started is many of our clinicians are using evidence based care tools as part of their practice, and so a big part of what we wanted to do, and we saw that we didn’t make it really easy though to track score, communicate those measures within SimplePractice. And last year was a foundational year for us on the evidence based or measurement based care front, where we built out, where we continued to expand our measured library, but the key was actually around automation of scoring and data visualization of what’s actually occurring for the provider and the client or patient. And we’re not in a position to negotiate rates, because we are a, you know, a core system for a provider. They are our customer who pays us. So we’re not in a position to negotiate rates, which I like. That’s probably another, another topic to delve into. But the hope would be is that, as you’ll see in 2026 payers are demanding and looking for fortunately or unfortunately evidence based data, whether it’s scoring of PHQ-9 or GAD-7, or starting to look at their networks, whether it’s independent clinicians or large group practices like a life stance, or some of these digital mental health companies, and having preference towards clinicians that can track outcomes and provide data. And it goes back to us of we don’t create those rules, but what we can do is put a clinician in control of do they want to share data? What do they get in return for that data? Is it in Is it done in a HIPAA compliant manner? And most importantly, can that, if the payer is looking at that data, how do we make sure that it’s useful for the provider as well? And I think that, you know, the optimist in me says, look, the end of the day payers, payers just want to take risk. And mental health is like the lowest for like the cheapest aspect, talk therapy is like one of the cheapest costs of healthcare. And so I think if SimplePractice can play a role in helping independent clinicians prove the value of mental health, not only on a, you know, on a symptomatic, or, you know, episodic basis for mental health, but on one’s physical health, in terms of ER visits, in terms of parenting, in terms of work productivity, etc, my hope would be like, that’s where, you know, a capitalistic society will pay more for that service that’s creating more value. And if SimplePractice can do that in a way that our customers trust and they’re in control in that data sharing, that’s what’s going to be key, and also ways that we can educate, just like AI around you know how to productively work with insurance, if that’s who you choose to to work with.

Curt Widhalm 35:48
I know a lot of the conversations that I’m hearing and seeing about SimplePractice and data, and you’re talking about this kind of stuff is some of SimplePractice’s, new AI features, and I want to give you a chance to talk about what some of those are, and then I have maybe follow up questions that I’m seeing asked from the community that our listeners would love to hear from, from you yourself.

Jonathan Seltzer 36:14
Thanks for being that bridge, Curt. Yeah. So what are we doing around AI? Well, we are, I guess, from a product like internally, we’re facing a lot of the same questions that our customers are. Where can we be applying AI in our own way that we deliver software? Whether that’s augmenting an engineer, a customer success individual, how do we think about expanding our content with AI, et cetera, and so I would say there’s a lot of exciting things, just internal use of AI, so that we can spend more time on the important things in terms of for our customers and the product roadmap. From a customer perspective, what we did last year was we took a step back, and we said, what do we believe needs to be true as it relates to AI? And number one is that it’s practitioner centered, practitioner focused, therapy is only therapy when there’s a licensed mental health clinician providing care. The second piece is that, as a EMR, we need to have just the highest of standards as we have high trust certification and HIPAA standards as it relates to PHI and how we give our customers education and control over that data. And then the other piece was we’ve continued to invest in our clinical team around how do we have clinical integrity of as we introduce AI as part of our product, it needs to be of the highest clinical standard, and that’s both internally employed individuals that are licensed clinicians and physicians as well as they’re not technically independent, but what I would say is a clinical advisory board that is made up of accomplished physicians, practitioners and, you know, many times, researchers in in this territory. So we think we’ve written out what we think about is our vision for AI around three key areas. One is AI to augment and empower from a clinical standpoint, AI, no shocker, to help with billing and the admin, which is, is, you know, less of a provocative topic. And then the third is AI to handle more of the admin of running a practice. And I’ll leave it to product marketing on how we’re going to, you know, share this as these releases come out. But I I think of it as I start SimplePractice. And I would love, you know, an intake coordinator. I would love a COO that helps me with the operations of my practice and is looking at utilization, or I would I would love an agent that is helping me with reporting and analytics, and not necessarily SimplePractice, spending a lot of time giving me, you know, the visualization tools or the reports, but spends more time providing me with insights in terms of the rates that I’m charging, or I’ve got a level of client churn that isn’t sustainable, etc. And so we think about AI in those three areas, and have product design and engineering team working a road across a roadmap across each of those three areas. The first release that we had earlier this year is our built AI scribe, which transcribes either virtual via telehealth or in person and summarizes a note in a note format that, we hope, continues to get better and better in terms of both clinically, but then also just reflective of how a customer drafts their notes and imports them into the record. And then we just went live with pre session summarization, which is really cool, of essentially giving customers the opportunity to summarize where they left off in terms of homework, background on the client, checking for any changes in medication, etc. I’m excited, as you can probably tell, in my voice, for the power of AI, as we think about again, original mission of taking away all that admin burden to allow for more time with a client or patient. But at the same time, you’ll see us move quite slowly and purposely on from a clinical perspective, and then we can move a little bit faster on some of these more administrative tasks that you know, frankly, many of us are becoming more and more accustomed to, just in our own day to day life where AI is deployed on a consumer level.

Katie Vernoy 41:06
I think there’s a lot to talk about with AI and data and clinical and I think we’ve talked about having somebody from your team come and have a full conversation about that, and we can, you know, maybe we can talk to your folks about having a link to some of the stuff that explains the AI in depth, because I think a lot of people are concerned about it. But at a high level, if you can talk a little bit about the clinical decision making from your clinical folks, or the data, legal, ethical stickiness that can come from incorporating AI into the clinical piece, because at this point, we’ve seen a lot of AI scribes that start doing treatment planning. SimplePractice isn’t there yet. I’m assuming that’s on the roadmap. There’s a lot of different elements that suddenly is actually taking some of the role of a clinician, and we’re and it sounds like SimplePractice doesn’t have in mind an AI therapy bot, but it’s that element of, how are you deciding what to do? What is the legal, ethical, clinical decision making that you’re doing around where AI fits in that that clinical bucket because the admin bucket? Yes, everybody’s a lot of people are cool with that, but it’s the clinical bucket that I’m curious about.

Jonathan Seltzer 42:28
Yeah, we have a AI governance team that’s made up of PhD psychologists, our chief legal, security and compliance officer, our chief technology officer, and then we also have our clinical advisory board. So anytime we put an idea on the roadmap as it relates to AI and clinical, there’s a very clear process in terms of wow, that what that goes through from a clinical standard that is ultimately set by senior clinical director. As in terms of then standards for putting it out in the market like our AI scribe, I can assure you that we go through a long beta or trial period in terms of testing. And first it was, it was actually really mock therapy between we have a pediatric psychiatrist on staff, and we have a PhD psychologist and them running sessions, mock sessions, with SimplePractice teammates to get a feel for that. And this was, this was almost like 20 plus, plus month ago, and then enrolling a range of clinicians across every single license type to begin to test and iterate on the quality of it, and getting it to a place that they felt was up to clinical standards, was not imparting level of biases, or, as you were saying, was presupposing a diagnosis or any sort of a treatment plan, but then ultimately summarized it in a way that the note isn’t auto submitted, that a clinician at the end of the day, just like they would draft a note, and oftentimes don’t submit it instantaneously, have an opportunity to modify and edit to the standard in which they’re practicing mental health care, which, again, is not our job as SimplePractice to to do that, but make it such a way that is as easy and less admin attached to it. Now, I think as we there’s some pretty cool, you know, features out in the market that and companies that our customers are working with that are going steps further in terms of treatment planning, out of session journaling and homework that we see potential for. But you’ll see us put it through the same level of rigor and compliance and security. And again, like, what I go back to is therapists having the choice to adopt or not and use it, you know, if they would like to test and integrate it into their practice.

Curt Widhalm 45:12
Can you speak to clinicians fears that you’re just listening in on sessions and you’re going to replace us all with AI bots and not need us at all?

Jonathan Seltzer 45:21
Sounds like a horrible, sounds like a horrible business model of we’re going to get rid of all of our customers through AI? No, I mean, it’s a it’s a serious question, so I don’t want to make light of it, but we are not listening in on sessions. Never have for the purpose of looking to replace our customers. Like I said, core principles around data security, practitioner and client first, and clinical integrity. I mean, at the end of the day, the I mean the reason why customers come to us is to store medical records and run a successful practice. I’m very excited about the opportunity for how AI can augment our clinicians. And I think there’s some exciting areas where, you know, AI of not even AI, but we’re looking into, how can we make it easier to, you know, get access to relevant information as part of a client’s physical records. We’re an EHR for mental health, but so much of what our customers need is access within medication, other forms of treatment that a client is, you know, going through, whether it’s, you know, new or existing. And like I see AI, just like we do a summarization tool, as a great summarization tool, depending on license type of what should a psychiatrist know about a client that we can be pulling from a physical record in partnership with some of these different data exchanges or direct integrations to other EMRs? So no, we are not looking to replace and the other piece that bums me out is people saying that we’re selling data our like, our only customer, the our only paying customer are independent clinicians, which, like, kind of stinks, but at the same time, like, that’s the sign of a really good product and service is, is someone paying for that solution that you’re receiving, and that’s who our customer is, and our customer is no one else.

Curt Widhalm 47:30
That sounds exactly like what a corporation who is copying therapist’s sessions would say in order…[laughter]

Jonathan Seltzer 47:40
No, I mean, I think what we do, we are monitoring very closely. Because, you know, thank gosh, which I think four or five states have come out with specific legislation to define, actually what therapy is and how you can in what’s marketing as therapy. Because there are certainly companies that are looking to build chat bots to replace a therapist, and our goal is we just we don’t believe like first take a step back. We said, Is this going to kill our business? Are these companies going to if they are going to kill our customers, it’s certainly going to replace our business. There’s going to no longer be a need. And we’ve said fundamentally, no, that is not moving in that direction. What we have said is that there is an opportunity for our customer, for us to learn and innovate, to help our therapists augment their practices with AI to provide better care. And I think there’s been some really exciting use cases in terms of just out of session coaching for a therapist after a review of a transcript of something basic of how much are you speaking versus the other individual or different words and cues that, Again, I’m not a psychologist or a practicing practitioner, but I would love feedback, and I get feedback from AI on the way that I’m coaching and leading. So I think there’s some some exciting ways to leverage it as part of the practice.

Katie Vernoy 49:15
We design these interviews to be evergreen, but this question is not, so I’m just going to frame it that way. There is a lot it sounds like in the pipeline for SimplePractice, but what can you tell us about where we currently are, or where you currently are within your roadmap? What’s exciting that’s coming down the pike that you can share with us, and maybe even some decision making around how you’re making decisions on what to build next and how to continue to improve SimplePractice.

Jonathan Seltzer 49:43
Couple key areas. One is we’re spending a lot of time on the billing workflow. That is a classic example of something that was built 10 plus years ago, and we’ve made modifications over the years and the team is working really hard to redesign that. I think they would also say that they’ve been disrupted with now, gosh, what can we be using in terms of AI in the background to streamline billing? The second key area is around practice insights and reportings reporting, so often I talk to individual clinicians, and they don’t have great insights into, you know, what can they control over their practice of, even if referrals are down, you know, how can they continue to run a sustainable practice? And so you’ll see us continue to invest in level of what I would just call reporting and insights to help them make better decisions as it relates to their their practice. The third area is you’re going to see big releases around insurance and making it easier for insurance verification and the claim submission process. And then, I guess, a lot, before we even talk about AI, you know, the other really exciting areas that so many of our customers are are building practices on SimplePractice and expanding and adding clinicians, sort of whether in a, you know, supervisor, supervisee relationship to we just had a 30 person group practice on our company wide that is all in on multidisciplinary care model across SLP and OT and PT in Ohio. And we are evolving, continue to evolve our platform to be a better fit for groups, not because we don’t believe in solo clinicians. In fact, you know, 80% of our 240,000 are are solo clinicians. But I think it continued to expand our products so that these are independent group practices that often don’t have any sort of investors, are not attached to a health system, and we need to continue to make reporting easier, roles and permissions easier, integrations with other technology to better run their business on the payroll side or accounting side. And then from an AI perspective, you’ll see us on the roadmap go deeper in terms of we just launched pre session summarization, but then starting to delve into how do we set up in terms of out of session homework, making it easy for that client record to come back to the therapist and summarize what was accomplished what was not. And then a fair amount of exciting pieces of AI around what we consider the practice assistant and billing assistant that will come over the course of 2026.

Curt Widhalm 52:50
Just to kind of make this a little bit more practical towards the last steps here. How can people sign up to be SimplePractice customers, what can they expect as part of the features that they would have access to to be able to test out if SimplePractice is right for them?

Jonathan Seltzer 53:11
That you’re kind to conclude in that manner, which I’d encourage you to start a free trial: simplepractice.com. We have a whole team that’s focused on, how do we get to that value, or Aha, moment of SimplePractice in a simple, intuitive way. So the best way is to experience it for yourself. If you would like to talk to me directly about starting SimplePractice, I’m at Jonathan J O, N, A T, H, A N.S@simplepractice.com, and welcome any existing customer feedback or dialog or if you’re a new customer, just wanting to talk about or new you know, passionate about mental health and where the industry is going, I’d love to hear from you. I talk to many. Try to allocate more and more of my calendar to just that.

Katie Vernoy 54:01
Who is SimplePractice for and who is SimplePractice not for?

Jonathan Seltzer 54:06
SimplePractice is for mental health clinicians that are looking to start, run, grow, independent, solo and small group practices. As much as I’d love to bring the power of SimplePractice to a number of outpatient specialties, where we really differentiate is focus on mental health. Maybe someday that’ll be a segment we go after, but we’ve got enough work, as our existing customers would tell you, certainly tell me, within that segment to make you know their independence and autonomy more of a reality. And we only, we only touched on a little bit of that as we think about rates. And we touched on referrals, working with insurance, etc. So we’ve, we’ve got a full, we’ve got a high bar to continue to get after here.

Katie Vernoy 55:00
So full disclosure, I have been a SimplePractice customer, I think, almost from the beginning, and currently, for folks who are listening to this as it comes out, the features that I see SimplePractice has, it’s a full electronic health record. It’s also, I think for a while it was, this is a practice management system, because it has so many pieces to on the admin side. There’s also a simple website that you can create. There’s Monarch, which is part of a referral base. There’s there’s so many pieces to it. And so I just want to encourage folks to check out what the current features are. And there’s different levels, and those types of things that can meet your practice. But one of the questions I wanted to just make sure that we not finish with, because I think it’s a it’s such a small question, but you talked about opting in and opting out, and so there are different levels, there are different things that people can opt in and out of. How is that decision made of what people can what kind of comes with the price of admission and what things are included, or, you know, they have to be opted in for.

Jonathan Seltzer 56:13
Our main goal is to design product that meets practitioners with what they’re trying to accomplish with their with their practice, tailor SimplePractice to that, and then price that appropriately, as you can imagine with 140,000 accounts across 240,000 clinicians, everyone is unique, and everyone has different motivations as it relates to their practice. And so we do our best to tailor what we have are three packages that we try to make as approachable and as best to fit for what a clinician is looking to accomplish, whether again, part time solo, full time solo or group practice. As part of that, we know that we’re not ever going to get it 100% right in terms of what’s included in each of those packages, but we continue to invest and we hear feedback from customers, because we can quickly see who’s leaving because of price, who’s not adopting certain features, even if it’s included in a package. And then also, as we continue to innovate in our roadmap, our hope is that, you know, we’re bolstering the value of those packages. And then you touched on the opting in and opting out. You’ll see more of us of where, you know, when I first joined telehealth was an add on. Now telehealth is included in every single package right now. AI is an add on or practice, you know, a practice website builder is an add on. You’ll see us continue to have other add on features that clinicians can choose to utilize or not, and that gives us a good sense of, you know, when is something a premium feature that not everyone’s going to like or need for their practice, but then at some point, at a later time, will make sense to just be embedded as part of a package based on adoption.

Katie Vernoy 58:11
There’s also the reasons that I think AI is currently an opt in or opt out is due to some of the misgivings that therapists have, and you’ve made it clear from all the messaging that I’ve received that the data sharing and and how clinicians interact with AI is going to be an opt in/opt out as well.

Jonathan Seltzer 58:32
Correct. It’s absolutely correct.

Curt Widhalm 58:36
Are there any offers that SimplePractice has out for people who are interested in trying it out to any special deals?

Jonathan Seltzer 58:44
It’s all on our website, and we, we’re running, you know, more than 7000 free trials a month, and converting a large percent of those to paying users, which is a number one metric I’m looking at daily in terms of who’s joining us, and so you’ll see that we have different promotional offers listed on on the website. And then also, the beauty is, is that a lot of our existing customers refer SimplePractice, both out of the goodness of their hearts, because they’re getting value from it, but then also, we absolutely compensate therapists for sharing the good word as well.

Katie Vernoy 59:29
And we as partners can sometimes have special offers, so we’ll put those over at our website, at mtsgpodcast.com, so you can check there to see if we’ve got something that will help convince you to start that process.

Curt Widhalm 59:41
Want to thank Jonathan Seltzer from SimplePractice for sharing his time and wisdom with us. And you can check out SimplePractice at simplepractice.com. We will include links to our offers and everything else in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com, and until next time, Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Jonathan Seltzer.

Katie Vernoy 1:00:06
So here is our opportunity to be able to reflect on the interview we just had, as well as our experiences with SimplePractice. And this one’s actually pretty easy for us, because we’ve both been SimplePractice users for a very long time. I think I realized maybe I’m 10 years in, or eight years in to my SimplePractice usership, and I continue to find it a platform that’s very easy for me. I am a solo practitioner, so I get to design what I want to do. There’s a lot of different conversations that we’ve had about setting up work practices and all those kinds of things, and a lot of those things are made easier, or, quote, unquote, simple because of my use of SimplePractice. Full disclosure, I’m also using the AI scribe, which is a work in progress, but also very helpful to me in my practice. So I think for individual practitioners who are wanting something that’s fairly easy to use, intuitive that has all the things that you need. I find SimplePractice to be very helpful in my in building my business and in continuing to be able to do the work sustainably.

Curt Widhalm 1:01:15
And like you, I’ve been a SimplePractice user for several years. I have a small group practice. Found a lot of ways to be able to make it work. So many of the things that make it easy are reasons why it’s so easy for Katie and myself to partner up once again with them and to put our stamp of approval on the way that SimplePractice goes about doing things and that they can sit and answer all of the questions that we will put at them, and take a lot of the feelings that you as our our listeners, the ones who support us, and to be able to go right to the top and say, Hey, you’re not really just going to replace us all with your AI bots, and to have that be an actual meaningful conversation. So we’re really thankful to SimplePractice and to once again, be in this partnership.

Katie Vernoy 1:02:08
So go on offer to our website, mtsgpodcast.com, I think there’s also modern therapist’s consumer guide.com, or something I don’t remember exactly. We’ll put it on the show notes so that you can find it. Oftentimes, we have a special offer that we can put forward, or just go to simplepractice.com and if you have questions about this, or you want us to follow up with SimplePractice on some of the questions that come up based on them being a very, at this point, very large company with investors, those types of things, we asked a lot of those questions in the interview. But if you have other questions that you want us to follow up on, we can do that, because we do have this partnership with them again. So I’m excited!

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