Practice Better's search functionality helps you quickly locate client information, resources, and messages across your practice. Whether you're looking for a specific client, reviewing past notes, or finding a particular form response, search puts everything at your fingertips.
Search Access by Plan Level
Your search capabilities depend on your Practice Better subscription plan. Our Sprout and Starter plans give you access to search basic information, notes, and tasks. To unlock the full power of Practice Better's Advanced Search features across all resource types, you'll need a Plus plan or higher.
The steps in this article pertain to the practitioner portal; there is not an equivalent search function in the client portal.
📍 Note: If you search for content in a resource category that isn't available in your current plan, results from that category simply won't appear on your results page.
Starting a Search
You can begin searching at any time by clicking the search icon in the top-right corner of your portal. For quick access on any computer, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + F:
Practice Better offers two main ways to search your data: you can search globally to find specific clients and locate client resources across your entire practice, or you can focus your search within a single client's record to review their individual information.
Open any client’s Recent Activity page to search within their respective client record.
Searching for Clients
The global search bar at the top of your portal is designed to help you quickly find clients by name or email address. Simply start typing, and Practice Better will display matching client names from your entire client list. This is perfect when you need to pull up someone's record quickly.
For a more comprehensive search across all clients, you'll want to use Advanced Search instead.
Using Advanced Search Across All Clients
When you need to search for specific information across your entire practice — not just client names — Advanced Search is your go-to tool. This powerful feature lets you query content within client records across all your clients at once.
To access Advanced Search, click the search icon (or search bar), type at least one character, and then select the Advanced Search option.
From here, you can search and filter through multiple client resource types simultaneously:
- Diet & Lifestyle Profiles
- Completed Forms
- Labs
- Medical History
- Notes
- Protocols
- Recordings
- Tasks (for practitioner)
- Tasks (for client)
Your search will scan through all available clients and return relevant results from any of these resources. Practice Better searches as far back as your available data goes — if the information exists in a searchable resource within your portal, it can be found.
✅ All set: Advanced Search won't display results from archived or deleted clients, ensuring you're always working with current, active data.
Searching Within a Specific Client Record
Sometimes you know exactly which client you're working with and just need to find something specific in their record. Client-specific searches can be performed from either the Recent Activity page or the Client Hub when you're viewing that client's profile.
This focused approach searches only within that individual client's data, making it faster to find what you need when you're already working in their chart.
Searching Chat Messages
Chat messages have their own dedicated search functionality to help you find past conversations quickly. You can search for messages in two ways:
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Within an open chat: Click the search icon in the top-right corner of the chat window to search messages in that specific conversation.
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From a client's Recent Activity page: Use the search box to find messages across all your conversations with that client.
This makes it easy to reference previous discussions, track client questions, or follow up on specific topics you've covered.
Advanced Search with Specific Phrases
Practice Better's Advanced Search is designed to be flexible and intuitive. By default, when you enter multiple words, the search returns results that contain any of those keywords. For example, searching for sleep imbalance will show results containing either "sleep" or "imbalance" or both.
When you need to find an exact phrase — like a specific diagnosis or treatment plan — wrap your search terms in double quotation marks: "sleep imbalance".
This tells Practice Better to return only results that contain those words together in that exact order.
📍 Note: Quotation marks are currently the only search operator available in Advanced Search (AND, OR logic not available). This focused approach keeps searching simple while still giving you the precision you need.
Filtering and Refining Your Results
Practice Better offers filtering options to help you narrow down your search results and find exactly what you're looking for:
When searching from the My Clients page: You'll have access to client filters that let you refine which clients appear in your results based on status, tags, or other client attributes.
Learn more about How to Search and Filter Clients in Practice Better →
In Advanced Search: After running your search, you can filter the results by resource type. This lets you focus on just notes, just forms, or any other specific category of information you're interested in.
These filters help you manage large result sets and zero in on the most relevant information quickly.
Working with Recent Search Terms
Practice Better remembers your recent searches to save you time. When you click your cursor in the search bar field, you'll see a dropdown displaying your recent search terms. You can click any of these to instantly run that search again, or click the “x” to remove the terms from your recent search history.
💡 Tip: While Practice Better doesn't offer a built-in way to save searches, you can create your own quick-access system. After running a search you use frequently, copy the URL from your browser's address bar. Then save it as a bookmark using Practice Better's in-portal Bookmarks feature. This gives you instant access to your most important searches anytime you need them.
Your search capabilities in Practice Better are designed to grow with your practice. Whether you're doing a quick client lookup or conducting a detailed review across multiple records, the right search approach helps you work more efficiently and serve your clients better.