Home > Medical Billing Software > DrChrono > DrChrono vs Waystar

DrChrono vs Waystar

Last Updated: November 18th, 2024

Our analysts compared DrChrono vs Waystar based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Medical Billing Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

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Product Basics

DrChrono is a cloud-based EHR and medical billing solution that replaces the chaos of paper charts and separate systems with a single, easy-to-use platform for managing all aspects of a medical practice.

For doctors, this means:

Effortless Access to Patient Information: Imagine having a patient's medical history — allergies, medications, past visits — at your fingertips.
Simplified Appointments and Prescriptions: Schedule appointments and send prescriptions electronically in just a few clicks.

For patients, it means:

Taking Control of Their Health: Book appointments, communicate with their doctor and access their own records through the patient portal.
Staying on Track: Receive automated reminders for appointments and medication refills.

And for the practice as a whole, the system helps:

Get Paid Faster: Automate billing and insurance claims to reduce errors and speed up payments.
Improve Financial Health: Track outstanding payments and identify potential billing issues.
Negotiate Better Rates: Gain insights to negotiate more effectively with insurance companies.

We tested the system to see how it works in real-world scenarios. Here’s what we think: while mastering the billing module may require some effort and billing data import has limitations, the system’s intuitive interface and accessibility from any device make it a user-friendly option.

A free trial and flexible pricing plans allow you to explore its potential and determine the right fit for your practice.

Waystar (formerly Navicure or ZirMed) is a cloud-based solution for managing a health organization’s revenue cycle. Over 25,000 hospital organizations and health clinics use this system to track patients' revenue from their first visit until their final balance has been paid.

It’s ideal for health care organizations of all sizes. It helps providers get paid faster and more accurately by automating tedious billing tasks, improving claim accuracy and offering in-depth reporting tools that uncover areas for efficiency gains.

Popular features include eligibility checks, claims submission and tracking, denial management, and analytics dashboards.

Users praise Waystar for its user-friendly design, ability to reduce billing errors, and seamless integration with other practice management systems.

While pricing varies based on factors like practice size and specific feature sets, the vendor offers a subscription model with fees based on metrics like claim volume.

$250/Provider, Monthly

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$100 Monthly

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Tailored to your specific needs

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Product Insights

Avoid Claim Denials: In our analysis, the product excelled with a perfect score of 100 for claims management capabilities, outshining competitors like athenahealth (89). It helps you:
- Fill out CMS-1500 forms.
- Create and send many claims at once.
- Look through past claims by date or type.
- Check all the claim details — like patient info and procedure codes — before sending it to payers.
- Match payments to bills.
Automate Billing, Insurance Checks and Patient Workflow Management: The product achieved a perfect score of 100 for these capabilities:
- Capturing records of medical services and charges.
- Keeping a detailed list of charges for exams, procedures and supplies.
- Helping doctors create and update patient visit records.
- Checking if a patient’s insurance is valid before their appointment.
- Automatically checking what medical benefits a patient has, like maternity or cosmetic surgery coverage.
- Letting patients access health info and advice through the patient portal.
- Allowing specialists to see patients referred by other doctors and send reports back.
- Helping doctors refer patients to other specialists.
Reduce Medical Coding Errors: In our analysis, the platform scored 98 for assigning the right billing codes like ICD, CPT, HCPCS, NDC and taxonomy codes.
Make Data-Driven Decisions: The product scored 88 for features that help you generate aging, billing transactions, revenue, write-off and adjustment reports. You can also access pre-built reports like payment trends and insurance analysis to save time creating them from scratch.
Access Data Remotely: The product scored 94 for mobile capabilities, more than its competitors like Oracle Ambulatory EHR (79) and athenahealth (71). It truly stands out for:
- Tracking claims from submission to payment directly from a phone.
- Sending messages easily to billers, patients and staff.
- Offering seamless access to the system on iPhone and Android devices with native apps.
- Delivering timely alerts for payment reminders, appointments and more through push notifications.
- Adapting to any device with a responsive web portal for a smooth user experience.
- Helping practitioners dictate medical notes directly into the app for easy note-taking.

Enhance Revenue Capture: Prevent lost revenue due to billing errors or missed opportunities with automated rules engines and advanced analytics. AnMed Health collected $931K in total rebilled and estimated additional revenue.
Boost Patients’ Financial Experiences: Use online payment portals to reduce payment friction. Renown Health reduced AR days by half while achieving a 3.8x increase in patient adoption of PatientWallet for payment management.
Streamline Claims Management Workflows: Achieve clean claims rate, reduce denials and automate claim submission processes with claim management capabilities. CPA Lab achieved 98% clean claim rate after using the solution.
Make Data-Driven Decisions: Access real-time dashboards and customize KPIs to improve financial and operational performance.
Optimize Revenue Cycle Management: Automate repetitive tasks like eligibility checks, claims scrubbing and payment posting to save time. Integrate with third party applications to consolidate financial data for efficient RCM processes.
Ensure Scalability and Adaptability: Adapt to industry changes and the growing needs of healthcare organizations.

EHR: Provide better care with features like free draw for visual explanations, custom vitals tracking and access to immunization registries
- Custom Templates: Tailor forms with specific fields, drop-down menus, checkboxes and even add your practice's logo. This ensures your documentation is consistent, efficient and specialized for your needs (e.g., cardiology forms with specific heart diagrams).
- Electronic Prescriptions: Send prescriptions electronically to pharmacies directly from the patient chart. Access the drug's formulary tier, prior authorization requirements and alternative medications if the prescribed drug isn’t covered. Access patient PDMP data directly within the EHR to identify potential abuse, misuse or doctor shopping.
- Free Draw: Upload images (x-rays, scans, photos) or use pre-loaded anatomical diagrams within the patient chart and draw directly on them.
- Custom Vitals: Create vitals specific to your needs including things like blood glucose and oxygen saturation levels. Capture data in various formats: text, numbers or predefined options using dropdown lists. Access the flowsheet to visualize trends in custom vitals over time.
- Prior Authorizations: Initiate the ePA request directly from the prescribing workflow. Automatically populate the prior authorization request form with relevant patient information (demographics, insurance details, medication prescribed) pulled from the patient's chart.
- Lab Orders: Integrate with national, regional and specialty labs like Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp. Create predefined lab panels for common tests or specific conditions. For example, you could create a "lipid panel" or a "prenatal panel" with a single click. View lab results within the patient's chart, organized by date, test type and ordering provider.
- Medical Speech-to-Text: Use voice to input clinical notes, patient histories and other information. See your spoken words appear as text in real time within the EHR to review and edit the transcription as you go.
- Immunization Registries: Automatically send your patients' vaccination details to the state IIS, ensuring that records are up-to-date and complete. Retrieve immunization records from the IIS, even if your patient received vaccinations elsewhere to avoid unnecessary duplicate vaccinations and identify potential gaps in their immunization schedule.
Practice Management: Save time and reduce errors with appointment management tools, including appointment profiles, insurance eligibility checks, online scheduling and automated reminders.
- Appointment Profiles: Instead of manually entering the same details (length, reason, etc.) for every appointment of the same type, you create a profile once and it auto-fills the details (duration, reason for visit, exam room and billing codes).
- Eligibility Checks: Verify your patients’ insurance eligibility in real time — check what services are covered under the plan (e.g., office visits, labs, specialists) and any limitations or exclusions.
- Online Scheduling: Set specific days and times when each provider is available for appointments. Offer different appointment types online (e.g., new patient, follow-up, consultation) with varying durations. Add buffer time between appointments to prevent scheduling conflicts and allow for patient check-in/check-out.
- Patient Reminders: Send automated appointment reminders via email, text or SMS. Configure reminders to be sent at various intervals before the appointment like — a few days before, the day before or a few hours before.
Medical Billing: Improve your revenue cycle management with tools like billing profiles, medical coding and automated claims submission.
- Billing Profiles: Combine frequently used CPT, HCPCS, custom codes and ICD-10 codes into a single profile. Attach common modifiers to the codes within the profile (e.g., modifier 25 for a significant, separately identifiable E/M service).
- Medical Coding: Easily search and select the appropriate codes within the EHR using keywords, code numbers or descriptions. Perform basic code checking to identify potential errors such as invalid codes or missing modifiers.
- Good Faith Estimates: Generate good faith estimates to help patients understand costs upfront and avoid surprise bills.
- Claims Submission: Submit electronic claims to insurance companies within the system. Track claim statuses in real time. Scrub claims for errors like missing information or formatting mistakes before submitting them to payers to avoid denials and claim rejections.
- Denial Resolution: Generate denial analysis reports to identify denial patterns. Edit and submit corrected claims directly within the system. If you disagree with a denial, generate appeal letters and track their statuses.
- Patient Statements: Generate statements for individual patients or groups of patients based on various criteria (e.g., date range, insurance status, outstanding balance).
BI Tools: Get a visual summary of key metrics and performance indicators. Generate customizable reports to:
- Track revenue, expenses and profitability
- Analyze claim submission, acceptance, denial and reimbursement rates.
- Track patient demographics, appointment history and billing information.
- Analyze appointment scheduling and no-show rates.
Mobile Capabilities: Schedule appointments, send patient statements, bill insurance, document patient encounters, access lab results and more from iOS devices like iPad, iPhone and Mac.
Telehealth: Patients can join the telehealth visit from their computer, tablet or smartphone using the link provided in their email reminder. Providers can share their screens with patients to review medical records, lab results, X-rays or educational materials.

Financial Clearance: Verify patient insurance eligibility, secure necessary authorizations and present clear cost estimates.
- Eligibility Verification: Instantly check patients’ insurance coverage and benefits, eliminating delays and potential errors. Automatically re-verify clients’ eligibility after data update. Apply payer-specific rules to interpret eligibility information accurately.
- Coverage Detection: Access customizable dashboards and reports to gain visibility into potential billable coverage. Use advanced algorithms and a vast payer database to streamline coverage discovery, reducing manual effort.
- Patient Estimation: Incorporate factors like contracted rates, insurance benefits, deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums to generate reliable estimates of a patient's financial responsibility. Share clear, easy-to-understand estimates with patients, building trust and minimizing billing surprises.
- Authorizations: Secure necessary approvals from insurance payers before rendering specific services, treatments or medications. Monitor authorization requests statuses (pending, approved or denied) in real time. Generate and track referrals to specialists or other facilities, ensuring compliance with payer requirements.
- Charity Screening: Analyze patient financial data (income, assets, etc.) against established charity care policies to quickly determine potential qualifications. Pull relevant financial information from multiple sources (credit reports, public records or patient self-attestation) for a comprehensive assessment.
Revenue Capture: Prevent billing errors, uncover missed charges, and eliminate undercoding and upcoding.
- Charge Integrity: Use complex algorithms and rules engines to scan billing codes (CPT, HCPCS, etc.) against documentation to identify missing or potentially inaccurate charges. Identify instances where codes may not fully align with services rendered, minimizing compliance risks and potential audits.
- DRG Anomaly Detection: Analyze patient data to compare the assigned DRG against what the documentation supports. Identify mismatches that could result in underpayment or overpayment. Flag DRG anomalies for review and correction before claims submissions.
- DRG Transfer: Analyze historical claims data to uncover potentially under-coded or missed TDRGs. Automate claims recalculating processes and refile them with the correct TDRG code, recovering what was rightfully owed.
Claim Management: Streamline claim submission and tracking processes.
- Claim Manager: Automatically scrub claims for errors, omissions and inconsistencies (missing modifiers or invalid codes) before submission. Help staff efficiently prioritize claims needing review or action (pre-edits, denials, etc.).
- Monitoring: Pull and update claim status details directly from payer portals. Access dashboards to gain an up-to-the-minute view of where claims stand in the process (submitted, in progress, paid or denied) for individual claims or across the whole A/R.
- Attachments: Securely transfer medical records, prior authorizations, EOBs, and other supporting files directly into the system. Process multiple attachments simultaneously, especially for high-volume situations.
Payment Management: Simplify patient and payer interactions with convenient digital payment options, clear estimates and automated payment posting tools.
- Payer Reimbursement: Use intelligent algorithms to match payments from payers to the specific claims they were intended for, even with partial payments or complex scenarios. Quickly locate and download ERAs for review or reconciliation.
- Patient Payments: Send digital bills and automated reminders, encouraging on-time payments. Enable patients to view balances and make payments using credit cards, debit cards or bank transfers.
- Agency Manager: Access vendor scorecards for analyzing agency activity and results. Employ reconciliation tools to assign each overdue account to the appropriate collection agency.
Denial Resolution: Mandate pre-submission validation on all claims to reduce the volume of preventable rejections and denials. Identify trends and patterns of denied claims to make strategic changes to processes, documentation or workflows.
Analytics and Reporting: Focus on critical indicators like denial rates, A/R days and clean claim rates.
- Medicare Analytics: Bypass manual processes and access Medicare's FISS system directly within the platform. Get clear claim status with easy-to-understand reason codes. Use worklists to prioritize denied, rejected, or RTP claims for rapid follow-up.
- Compliance Reporting: Monitor and report on key quality measures like MIPS and HEDIS mandated by CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) and other payers. Automatically retrieve the latest CASPER reports directly from CMS.

Product Ranking

#8

among all
Medical Billing Software

#43

among all
Medical Billing Software

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

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User Sentiment Summary

80%

of users recommend this product

DrChrono has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 80% when considering 529 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

91%

of users recommend this product

Waystar has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 91% when considering 315 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

1.5 (3)

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4.2 (39)

4.6 (116)

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Awards

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Ease of Use: Navigate patient charts, create shortcuts and access billing info without a steep learning curve.

Customization: Tailor the system to your specific needs and preferences like customizing templates, workflows and reports.

Easy Medical Coding: Find and assign ICD, CPT and HCPCS codes to patients' bills to save time and reduce coding errors.

Robust Integration Capabilities: Integrate with EHRs, medical billing solutions and practice management systems to eliminate duplicate data entry.

Easy-to-Use Dashboard: Gain a centralized view of key metrics for quick insights on claim statuses, denial rates and reasons, and A/R aging.

Comprehensive Revenue Cycle Management Suite: Eligibility verification, coding, payment posting, and analytics and reporting tools help practices streamline revenue management processes.

Contractual Obligations: Canceling subscriptions can be challenging, potentially leading to early termination fees. Automatic renewals may also catch you off guard.

Subpar Customer Support: Long wait times, unhelpful responses and unresolved issues from customer representatives might disrupt your processes.

Occasional Glitches: System crashes, slow navigation and difficulties with scheduling and other functionalities can cause frustration.

Steep Learning Curve: Training can be time-consuming and disruptive to practice’s workflow initially.

High Cost: Initial expenses (setup and software licenses) can be significant.

Complex Secondary Claims Submission: May require manual workarounds, resulting in reimbursement delays.

So, I got the chance to get a free trial access to DrChrono, and here are the key highlights: The platform stands out for its intuitive design, extensive features and customization capabilities. The software is accessible on any device with internet connectivity. Data import from other EHR systems is supported but with certain limitations. It offers four pricing plans and a free trial is available for potential users.It's a cloud-based system, which means you can access it from anywhere — your laptop, tablet, even your phone! And it covers everything from electronic health records and patient scheduling to billing and telehealth.One of the things that really impressed us was how customizable it was. You can create your own templates for notes, forms and even entire workflows. This means you can really tailor it to fit your specific needs and preferences, which can save a ton of time.And speaking of saving time, they've put a lot of thought into their billing features. They have tools to help you code things correctly, submit claims electronically and even track your payments. Anything that helps you get paid faster and with less hassle is a win, right?However, learning to navigate the billing and insurance modules could take time. It’s a bit confusing to understand how the billing workflow works and how to set one up. Also, you can’t import billing data from your old EHR system.If you're looking for a comprehensive, user-friendly system that can be customized to your practice, we'd definitely recommend taking a closer look.They offer four different pricing plans, so you can find one that fits your budget, and they have a free trial so you can test it out and see if it's a good fit for you. It's always good to try before you buy, right?We’ve discussed more about the features in the See It in Action section. Do check it out to know how the system works in different scenarios.

Waystar's core strength lies in its ability to automate repetitive, error-prone tasks within RCM. This can free up significant staff time for higher-value work, and reduce costly mistakes that lead to denials or missed revenue. Additionally, analytics tools appear robust, providing insights that can drive better decision-making around process improvement and resource allocation.However, smaller practices may find the cost and complexity prohibitive. Additionally, like any cloud-based system, maximizing Waystar's value will require ongoing training and attention to updates.

Screenshots

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FAQ

How can I do a in-depth comparison of DrChrono and Waystar? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

What are the top-rated propducts for Medical Billing Software? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Which Medical Billing Software is rated the highest by users? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Is there a requirement template for Medical Billing Software? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

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