If you're a pre-licensed clinician under supervision or will be supervising pre-licensed clinicians in your group practice, you’ll want to designate a supervisor and/or supervisee in your account to properly review and sign notes.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• Designating a supervisor
• Designating a supervisee
• Reviewing and signing notes
• Adding supervisor information to billing documents and notes
• Troubleshooting access to supervisee notes

Note: To learn more about the supervisor role, see Team member roles and access levels.

Designating a supervisor

Important: Before designating a supervisor, add any supervisees as team members to your group practice if you haven’t already. Pre-licensed clinicians under supervision won’t need to add license information or their NPI number to their SimplePractice profile. For details on this process, see Adding a new team member.

In group practices, you can add the supervisor role to yourself or any other existing team member. To do this:

• Navigate to Settings > Team Members 
• Click the team member you’d like to assign the supervisor role to
• Next to Role info, click Edit

• Check the box for Supervisor
• Click Continue

• Add any additional permissions, if necessary
• Select Continue
• Click Save changes

Designating a supervisee

Once you’ve assigned the supervisor role to yourself or another existing team member, you can designate who the supervisees will be. To do this: 

• Navigate to Settings > Team Members 
• Click the name of the supervisee
• Next to Clinical info, click Edit

• Toggle Under supervision on
• Select their supervisor from the drop-down menu

• Click Save
• Repeat these steps for any other supervisees in your group practice

If you’re a supervisee, you can also select your own supervisor through your own account:

• Navigate to Settings > Profile & Security > Clinical
• Check the box for I’m pre-licensed under supervision
• Select your supervisor from the dropdown menu

• Click Save Information

Note: While a supervisor can have an unlimited number of supervisees, a supervisee can only have one supervisor.

Reviewing and signing notes

Once a supervisor and supervisee have been designated in your account, when the supervisee writes a progress note and clicks Save, they have the option to either Edit or Sign & Share: ​​​​

Once the progress note is shared, the supervisor can review their supervisee's notes. To do this:

• Click Supervision from the Calendar

Note: Clinicians in the supervisor role will see a Supervision counter that represents how many items of documentation are waiting for their review. This counter will increase by 1 each time the supervisee has signed and shared a progress note, diagnosis and treatment plan, or assessment. It will decrease by 1 when the supervising clinician unlocks, requests edits, or signs the documentation.

• Select the note you want to review

• Click Request Edits or Sign

• The Sign option will lock the progress note and add the supervisor's eSignature
  • When this option is selected, the supervisor will see a confirmation modal where they can click Sign & Lock

• They'll then see both the provider's and supervisor's signatures

Note: There currently isn't a way to customize this signature.

• The Request Edits option will send the note back to the supervisee to make additional edits before the supervisor approves it
  
  • When this option is selected, the supervisor will be able to Edit, Delete, or Sign the note
• ​​​​​​The supervisee will see the note back in their account to edit and resubmit

Note: To learn more about the process to amend, correct, or clarify a locked note, see Using progress and psychotherapy notes.

Adding supervisor information to billing documents and notes

You can also add supervisor information to billing documents and notes. That way, this information automatically populates for pre-licensed clinicians in your practice. To do this:

• Navigate to Settings > Documents
• Select the box for Add supervisor info to notes and billing documents, under Pre-licensed Clinicians

• You can edit what's listed in the Footer Information textbox
  • If you have multiple interns that may have different supervisors, don't remove the macros in the pre-filled message below. These macros automatically fill in the intern's supervisor's information if they have filled it out in their account settings
• Click Save Documents

Troubleshooting access to supervisee notes

If your supervisor can't see your progress notes, you'll want to make sure that they're logged in as a supervisor and that notes have been saved, signed, and shared. The supervisee can also check their Clinical Info tab to verify if and by whom they're under supervision.

A supervisor logged into their account will see a Supervision tab in the left column of their Calendar:

If you're ready for your supervisor to review your notes, you'll need to save and share them. To save and share the completed progress note, click Save and then Share & Sign with Supervisor.