The Best Coaching Platform for Your Wellness Business
This post contains affiliate links, through which we may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase, at no additional cost to you. We only share products or services we personally use & recommend!
As a health coach, you likely have about a million different tools and systems in place for recruiting, tracking, managing and working with your health coaching clients—things like appointment scheduling, a billing system, email marketing software, a video conferencing platform, a secure platform for sending and signing documents, or sharing wellness resources and action plans… am I missing anything?!
While there are so many awesome tools and apps for each of these steps of client management and health coaching business operations, there’s one little problem I found with juggling them all: there’s a lot of duplication of effort (and cost!), and the tools don’t always speak to each other as we’d like.
Early on in health coaching, I found I was wasting way too much time setting up and linking all of these different platforms and trying to get them to work together seamlessly as I onboarded clients, scheduled sessions, set up billing, shared documents and more.
Then, I was fortunate to come across a tool that is a magical one-stop-shop for all of these different health coaching operations—and specifically designed for the wellness industry!
I’ve mentioned this particular health coaching software before (and have shared it in our list of best business resources for health coaches), but thought I’d go into some more detail on what exactly it is—and why it’s so helpful for online health coaches in particular.
The best client management software for health coaches
Practice Better is my favorite platform for online health coaching because it does it all in one place.
It offers secure, cloud-based practice management with one tool. Besides being simpler and easier to manage than piecing together multiple tools to accomplish the same effect, this also saves time and money because you need fewer applications/software subscriptions overall. (Woohoo!)
If you’re already saying “Yes, yes, yes, this is exactly what I need!”—here’s a link to try Practice Better free, up to three clients:
And, here are some more details on what all you can do with Practice Better, and why I’m such a fan:
Health coaching client management
I’ll go into more detail on additional aspects of client management below, but here are a few overarching key features of how Practice Better helps health coaches manage and interact with your clients:
First of all, the platform is HIPPA and GDPR compliant, so your data is all safe, secure and legally compliant.
Fillable forms and waivers can be sent to clients and e-signed (yay, e-signing!)—and templates make it really easy to duplicate/customize forms and share them with new clients.
Session notes allow you to take notes during client sessions and keep them stored in each client’s account.
Send clients specific recommendations and tasks and help them stay accountable.
If you happen to work with a specific niche, you can create recommendation templates to share protocol for common concerns or goals you work with. The templates can all be easily customized for clients’ individual needs.
Health coach client scheduling
With 1:1 health coaching, one of the most important business operations to streamline is client scheduling. Gone are the days of emailing and calling clients to set up appointments (or cancel or reschedule them!).
While I do love Acuity Scheduling for its seamless integration with Squarespace websites (my very fave), if you’re using Practice Better you won’t need another scheduling tool.
Practice Better has a built-in scheduling tool that’s very similar to Acuity. You’re able to set your availability and allow clients to book sessions with you from your website or the Practice Better mobile app (which we’ll get to below—one of the best perks about this platform!).
A few other important features with Practice Better scheduling:
Use packages to bundle sessions (key for health coaching programs!); the tool will automatically keep track of how many sessions a client has used and has remaining.
Set up buffer time for yourself between sessions as well as booking restrictions, like the number of sessions that can be booked or how early/far in advance sessions can be booked.
Two-way sync with Google or Apple Calendar to keep your personal calendar up-to-date and avoid double-booking.
Send automated confirmation notifications and reminders via email, text message and/or app notifications (helps reduce client “no shows”).
As needed, send forms (like waivers!) with the booking process.
Health coach session billing + payments
Practice Better also acts as your invoicing service and payment gateway for any health coaching sessions or packages you sell. There’s a lot of flexibility with how you can set up billing and invoicing options for your clients, including creating payment plans, accepting deposits, and offering coupons.
Secure payment is made directly through Practice Better (no separate invoicing tool needed!) and linked to either your Stripe or Square account.
For online health coaches, payment is accepted in multiple currencies if you happen to have international clients. And, though you hopefully won’t have to, it’s easy to process either full or partial refunds if needed.
Telehealth video conferences for health coaching sessions
Okay, this is one of the coolest features! Conduct your 1:1 health coaching sessions directly from Practice Better, via the mobile app or web browser.
This is one of the more secure ways to offer remote video coaching, and it’s super convenient in that clients know exactly where to go to meet you (no need to find the Zoom link, password, etc.!). The video conferencing also allows screen sharing if you’d like to share your screen.
Secure messaging for health coaches
Many health coaches already utilize text messaging to communicate with clients—it has become the preferred method of communication and check-in for many clients.
The Practice Better platform provides secure messaging, which is a great benefit for health coaches, because it makes it easy to establish boundaries and communicate with clients from one secure place—no more calls/texts/emails/Instagram DMs to keep up with across multiple different platforms.
A couple other cool features: You can get read receipts from clients to know when they’ve seen your message (though they won’t get read receipts from yours, don’t worry!). And you can “pin” important messages or documents for clients to easily refer back to in the future.
Notifications for clients + health coaches
One of the features that’s super nice for busy solopreneurs (because, let’s face it—our minds are all over the place much of the day!) is the built-in alerts and notifications. Depending how you set them up, these can come up as browser alerts on your desktop (even when you’re not logged in to the Practice Better portal) or push notifications on your phone.
They’re super helpful in staying on top of your schedule and being sure you never miss a session or important detail!
Clients can also set up their own notifications on desktop or the mobile app (which many prefer to use). You can also send them text message notifications and reminders.
Health coaching client accountability
I know I keep saying “this is one of the coolest features!” but this one definitely is!
Many health coaches know how challenging it is to keep clients focused and on track with all of their key information and materials in an easy-to-find location—and the more complexity we add into accessing food journals or handouts, the less likely they are to be used (I get it!).
This is one of the super helpful things about Practice Better: It has built-in features to support client accountability.
Things like making it super clear where to find any and all materials and information. Hosting clients’ food or lifestyle journals, so they can easily make entries and you can easily review them (and even provide comments for motivation and/or guidance!). The food journal comes with a database of over 600,000 foods, though there’s also an option to add custom foods as well. Depending on specific client needs, you as the coach can choose if clients are able to view the nutritional data (like calories) on their daily food intake. The lifestyle journal also allows clients to track things like mood, bowel movements, etc.
There’s also an easier way to set up and track progress toward specific nutrition and lifestyle goals. I can’t tell you how many methods I tried to come up with for tracking client progress in a way that didn’t feel too elementary-school-gold-star-on-a-chart, if ya know what I mean. The Practice Better platform allows you to create specific tasks or goals for clients to complete, all of which they can monitor on their mobile app. You can also set up reminders and notifications to keep them on track!
Wellness programs + online courses
We’ve shared lots before about the many benefits of hosting online membership programs and courses—something I’m really passionate about!
I’m still a big fan of MemberSpace (that’s what we use to membership-protect our Wellness Library and upcoming Health Coach Business School) and think it’s the best option for hosting online programs and courses on your Squarespace website.
However, if you’re using Practice Better for your health coaching practice, there’s another super huge benefit over there: the ability to host programs directly from the Practice Better platform (aka no need to set up and pay for other membership-protection services).
A few of the key program & online course features here:
Offer either fixed-date or evergreen (always available to enroll) programs
Add tasks, worksheets, or even journals as needed
Content can be available immediately or dripped (available at a specific day/time)
Track client progress and connect to their general Practice Better health record
Health coaching mobile app
The Practice Better mobile app (available for iPhone/iPad and Android) is a huge benefit of using this platform, both for health coaches and clients.
It offers a really convenient way for clients to access all session or program materials—things like recommendations, resources, journals, tasks, and more. They can also schedule and join video sessions and send/receive secure messages on the app.
From the coach side of things, you have your practice at your fingertips! You can manage any aspect of it from your phone, wherever you are—the app has full access to client data, messaging, scheduling and more.
Teams
If you happen to work on a team, Practice Better allows you to streamline operations across team members, so you can all share forms/documents, resources, calendars and consistent branding.
Free plan!
You can try Practice Better for free! Their free (“Sprout”) plan allows you to test it out with up to 3 clients, so you can get a feel for the platform and some of its basic features.
Try Practice Better {for free!} for up to 3 clients:
Most health coaches will find the Professional or Plus plans to be the best option for being a “one-stop-shop” tool that covers all business needs (onboarding, scheduling, telehealth video chat, online programs, and branding)—but, you can take a peek with the free Sprout Plan to see what it’s like before committing!
Perfect your health coaching website
Grab my free checklist for optimizing your wellness website!
It’s got all the big picture must-haves (& all the important little details!) to make your health coach website shine. ✨
