Getting Started With CoralEHR: Your First Week, Day by Day

Your First Week Is the Free Trial

Switching electronic health records is the kind of task that sits on a to-do list for months because it sounds like a weekend you will never get back. The good news: your first week in CoralEHR is designed to be lived inside a 30-day free trial with no credit card. You can import your charts, draft a note, send intake, run a telehealth session, and take a payment before you ever decide to subscribe.

This guide walks through that first week day by day. None of it requires you to abandon your current system on Day 1 — you can run in parallel, move one workflow at a time, and only commit once it feels right. Treat the schedule below as a suggestion, not a deadline. Some clinicians compress it into an afternoon; others spread it across two weeks between sessions.

A quick note on what this article is and is not: this is practice-operations education for clinicians evaluating software, not legal, clinical, or compliance advice. Any patient examples below are fictional and composite. Verify your own regulatory obligations with your licensing board and, where appropriate, a healthcare attorney.

Day 1: Import Your Charts and Sign the BAA

The first day is about making the system yours — your patients, your calendar, your practice details — so the rest of the week has something real to work with.

Start by importing existing patient demographics and history. You bring over names, contact details, and the background you already have, so charts carry forward rather than starting blank. If you are coming from a spreadsheet, a previous EHR export, or paper, the goal is the same: get your active caseload into the system before you do anything else.

Before any protected health information moves, get the paperwork right. CoralEHR runs on HIPAA-compliant infrastructure and signs a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with every account. The BAA is executed under HIPAA and HITECH and their implementing regulations at 45 CFR Parts 160 and 164 — the same legal framework every compliant vendor relationship sits on. A countersigned copy with your practice's name and effective date is provided before CoralEHR handles PHI on your behalf. If you are still building your compliance foundation more broadly, our HIPAA guide for private practice therapists covers the five things that actually matter for solo clinicians.

By the end of Day 1 you should be able to open a patient's chart and see a familiar name looking back at you. That is the moment a new system stops feeling abstract.

Day 2: Draft Your First AI Note — You Review and Sign

Day 2 is the one most clinicians are curious about, and it is worth being precise about how it works, because the AI note workflow is the single biggest difference between CoralEHR and a traditional chart.

Here is what CoralEHR's AI does: it drafts a structured progress note from the scratchpad notes you type during or after a session and the structured fields already in the chart. Here is what it does not do. It does not record your session — there is no microphone, no transcript, no ambient listening. It does not diagnose, decide on treatment, or choose a medication. And it does not sign anything.

Every AI-generated draft is stored as a preliminary document (in technical terms, FHIR docStatus=preliminary) until a licensed clinician reviews it, edits it, and signs. You are the author and the signer of every note in the chart. The AI hands you a first draft of the words; you decide whether those words are accurate, you change what is wrong, and you put your name on it. Guardrails on every AI surface forbid the model from offering a diagnosis, a treatment decision, a medication recommendation, or a prognosis.

The privacy posture underneath this matters as much as the workflow. CoralEHR sends every AI request over a single enforced path to Anthropic's first-party Claude API — never a third-party reseller — and those inputs are not used to train models. Operational logs carry hashed identifiers rather than session text. This is the commitment CoralEHR puts in writing in its No AI Therapist Pledge. (The pledge page ships alongside a sibling release; if the link is not yet live when you read this, the same commitments are summarized on the BAA page.)

One practical note on plans: all AI documentation — the session note loop, treatment-plan suggestions, and the Coral assistant — ships in the Professional plan ($79/month). The Starter plan ($29/month) is AI-free by design. During your 30-day free trial, every Professional feature is unlocked, so you can run the full AI note loop on Day 2 at no cost and decide on your plan later. If you want the side-by-side on how AI notes work in practice, the AI progress notes use-case page goes deeper.

Day 3: Send Intake Forms and Set Up the Client Portal

With a couple of charts open and a note drafted, Day 3 moves to the part of practice that eats the most administrative time: intake.

Send your intake packet — consents, demographics, history forms — to a new or existing client through the portal instead of printing, scanning, and re-keying. The client completes it on their own device, and the answers land back in the chart as structured data rather than a PDF you have to transcribe.

This is also the natural day to attach your first assessments. CoralEHR ships standardized instruments like the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 that auto-score on submission. The scoring here is not invented; it follows the published, validated scales. The PHQ-9 produces a total from 0 to 27, with cut points at 5, 10, 15, and 20 demarcating mild, moderate, moderately severe, and severe depressive symptoms (Kroenke, Spitzer & Williams, 2001). The GAD-7 produces a total from 0 to 21, with cut points at 5, 10, and 15 for mild, moderate, and severe anxiety (Spitzer et al., 2006). When a client submits, the score is computed and attached to the chart automatically, so you are reading a number, not adding one up by hand.

To make this concrete with a fictional, composite example: imagine a new client, "Jordan," who completes intake the night before the first session. By morning, Jordan's PHQ-9 of 14 (moderate) and GAD-7 of 11 (moderate) are already in the chart, scored and trended, so the first session starts with data instead of a clipboard. That is the kind of small reclaimed hour that adds up across a caseload.

Day 4: Build Your Schedule and Take a Payment

Day 4 is about the business mechanics — the calendar and the money — that keep a practice running.

Set your availability, add your appointment types and durations, and connect payments so clients can be charged for sessions. For most solo and small practices, the win on this day is consolidation: scheduling, charting, and billing living in one chart instead of three browser tabs that do not talk to each other.

If you are evaluating CoralEHR against your current spend, this is a good moment to do the math. Our practice savings calculator lets you model what consolidating tools and trimming per-seat AI add-ons does to your monthly cost. That comparison is worth making with real numbers, because the add-on economics across the category are not trivial — more on that below.

Day 5: Run a Telehealth Session End to End

By the end of the week you run a full session inside the system: telehealth video, a scratchpad during the visit, an AI-drafted note afterward that you review and sign, and a billed appointment — all in one chart, with one login.

Running one real (or one mock) session end to end is the single best test of whether a new EHR fits the way you actually work. It surfaces the friction points a demo never will: how many clicks to start a session, where the note lives, how the payment posts. If Day 5 feels smooth, the rest of your caseload will migrate easily. If it does not, you have found exactly what to ask about — and you have not spent a dollar to find out.

How CoralEHR Compares on AI Add-On Pricing

A fair question during any trial is "what will this actually cost once the AI is part of my daily workflow?" Across the category, AI documentation is usually sold as a per-clinician add-on stacked on top of your base subscription. Here is what the major vendors charge, quoted from their own published materials as of June 2026:

• SimplePractice offers its AI Note Taker as an optional $35/month per clinician add-on after a free trial, per SimplePractice's own support documentation.
• TherapyNotes enables TherapyFuel for $40 per clinician per month, which TherapyNotes describes on its own blog as including an ambient Scribe that transcribes in-person and telehealth sessions.
• TheraNest (Ensora Health) offers its AI Session Assistant for $35 per clinician per month; per Ensora's own feature page, it generates SOAP drafts from recorded sessions, with recordings deleted within 24 hours.

Two things stand out. First, the recording-centered approach is common: both TherapyNotes' Scribe and TheraNest's AI Session Assistant work by listening to or recording the session. CoralEHR's AI takes the opposite approach — it drafts from your typed scratchpad and the structured chart, with no session recording required. That is a meaningful difference if you or your clients are uneasy about a microphone in the room. Second, the add-on stacks. On most platforms the AI fee is on top of the base plan; in CoralEHR, the full AI workflow ships inside the Professional plan ($79/month) with no per-seat AI surcharge, and it is free during the 30-day trial. For a fuller breakdown, see our CoralEHR vs. SimplePractice comparison.

None of this is a knock on the other tools — they are capable platforms, and many clinicians are happy on them. The point is to make the trade-offs visible so your first week is an informed test, not a leap of faith.

What to Have Ready Before You Start

You can move faster if you gather a few things first:

• Your active caseload — names, contact details, and any history you want to import on Day 1.
• Your intake packet — the consents and forms you currently use, so you can rebuild them in the portal on Day 3.
• Your fee schedule and availability — so Day 4 takes minutes, not an afternoon.
• A clear head about the AI — remember that it drafts and you sign. Nothing gets finalized without you.

The Bottom Line

A new EHR does not have to be a lost weekend. In five days you can import your charts, draft a note the AI never finalizes for you, digitize intake, build your schedule, and run a real telehealth session — entirely inside a free trial, with no credit card on file. If it fits, Starter is $29/month and Professional (with the full AI workflow) is $79/month. If it does not, you have lost nothing but an afternoon of curiosity.

When you are ready, start your free trial, or book a walkthrough if you would rather have someone show you the path before you click around on your own.

This article is practice-operations and clinician education, not legal, clinical, or compliance advice. Patient examples are fictional and composite. Verify your regulatory obligations with your licensing board and a qualified professional.