Our Full Review
DrChrono's appeal for pediatrics starts with the iPad. In a practice where providers bounce between exam rooms all day, the tablet-native design is genuinely pleasant, and being able to turn the screen around and walk a parent through their child's growth curve during the visit is a small thing that families remember. Several of us kept mentioning that moment in our notes, which tells you something.
The honest question is how much you are willing to build. DrChrono is not a pediatric EMR; it is a flexible general-purpose one. The template builder is capable, and the marketplace offers some community-contributed pediatric templates, but their quality is uneven. One 15-month template we downloaded was thoughtful and complete. Another was clearly assembled by someone who had never sat through a well-child visit.
Immunization tracking covers the basics, with schedule display and registry reporting in most states. The forecasting engine is where the limits show. Straightforward schedules work fine, but when we ran our usual test case, a school-age child adopted internationally with a partial vaccination record, the catch-up plan required manual calculation against CDC guidance. If your practice sees many children with complicated vaccine histories, that gap will cost you time on a regular basis.
There is no native integration with the ASQ or M-CHAT, so developmental screening means building custom forms or keeping paper alongside the EMR. School forms are largely manual. The parent portal handles messaging and scheduling but nothing more sophisticated, and the billing layer lacks pediatric coding intelligence, so your billers will need to know their 90460s and 90461s cold.
For a small, mobility-minded practice with someone on staff who enjoys configuration, DrChrono can become a workable pediatric system at a reasonable price. Just go in knowing the pediatric layer is yours to construct and maintain.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
- Excellent iPad-native experience for exam room use
- Showing growth charts to parents on a tablet works beautifully
- Flexible template builder for practices willing to customize
- Basic weight-based dosing support in e-prescribing
- Accessible entry-level pricing
Weaknesses
- Immunization forecasting cannot be trusted with complex catch-up schedules
- No native ASQ or M-CHAT integration
- School form generation is essentially manual
- Marketplace pediatric templates vary widely in quality
- Billing lacks pediatric specialty coding intelligence
Pricing
Tiered monthly subscription. Contact DrChrono for details.