How PracticeVerdict reviews mental health software
Every product is scored 0–10 across five weighted criteria, with HIPAA non-compliance treated as a hard gate. Vendors do not see articles before publication. Affiliate commissions do not influence scoring.
The five-criteria scoring rubric
For PracticeVerdict specifically, we add a HIPAA compliance gate: any product failing baseline HIPAA technical safeguards (signed Business Associate Agreement available, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging, role-based access controls) is not reviewed. We list it in the methodology appendix with the failure reason and move on. The remaining criteria only apply to products that clear the gate.
What our sources are
For each review, we synthesize across the following source categories. Sample sizes and date ranges are disclosed inside each article.
- Vendor documentation and pricing pages (current as of the article's "Last updated" date)
- r/therapists, r/socialwork, r/psychotherapy threads (combined ~340k subscribers; we monitor monthly)
- Private clinician Facebook groups (read-only, two groups, ~22k combined members)
- G2 / Capterra / TrustPilot review distributions — sample size, average, and distribution shape reported, not just the average
- Trade press: Behavioral Health Business, Mental Health Tech News, the Health IT News mental-health beat
- Hands-on trial of free tiers or demo accounts where vendors offer them
What we test hands-on
We sign up for and use the free tier or trial of every product we review when one is available. For products without trial access (mostly enterprise-tier EHRs), we synthesize from documentation, third-party reviews, and clinician interviews — and we say so explicitly inside the article ("We did not test [Product] hands-on; this review synthesizes 47 user reviews and vendor documentation").
How we handle anonymized expert input
For pillar articles requiring domain expertise — HIPAA interpretation, billing workflow nuance, specific clinical use cases — we interview real licensed practitioners and quote them anonymously with their consent. Format: "A licensed clinical social worker with 11 years in private practice, interviewed for this piece, told us...".
We verify credentials before quoting (state licensure lookup), pay industry-standard interview rates, and disclose the interview count per article. We do not publish anonymous quotes we have not independently verified.
Affiliate relationships
PracticeVerdict participates in the affiliate programs of many of the products we cover. When you click an affiliate link and sign up or purchase, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. We disclose this at the top of every article that contains affiliate links, per FTC guidance.
Independence policy:
- Affiliate commission rates have no bearing on scoring or ranking.
- Where two products would otherwise rank identically, ties are broken on the lower commission — explicitly, to bias against pay-to-play.
- We do not accept paid sponsorships, vendor-paid placements, or "sponsored content."
- We do not allow vendors to review articles before publication.
Update cadence
- Pricing changes are monitored monthly. Articles are updated within 30 days of a detected change.
- Major feature changes trigger a quarterly review of the top 50 articles on the site.
- Industry shifts (acquisitions, deprecations, new entrants) prompt article updates within two weeks of public news.
- The "Last updated" date is visible at the top of every article.
Corrections
Errors are corrected in-line with a visible (Updated: YYYY-MM-DD) note. Substantive factual corrections are logged on our corrections page. We do not silently rewrite published claims.