The clinician's guide to using Note Taker – Expert-led class

Hi everyone. I wanted to record this video update for this course because SimplePractice released a new feature set called Care Aide. So I don't know about you but sometimes I have this really frazzled feeling where I'm trying to remember what happened in a session that happened maybe a week ago or even a month ago and spending a lot of time in between sessions trying to catch up on what just happened previously. With Care Aide, so much of that stress has been taken off of my plate. It carries a thread of information through so that we are able to provide better care for our clients. Your day is so much easier when you don't actually have to constantly feel like you are catching up or trying to remember what happened in the past with your clients. The best part is it includes notetaker and a whole lot of other tools that really help make your life so much easier. Let's start with intake summaries. Now these are mostly for new clients but when your clients submit their intake paperwork, Care Aide reads through all of it and produces a summary. It includes things like the clients presenting concerns, any clinical alerts like an elevated PHQ nine, any of their scored measures that you might have had them fill out, and even how many forms are outstanding that they still need to to fill out. And the best part is as your clients fill out more forms the summary just continues to update so you are always staying up to date. I walk in knowing all of the information that I need to know in order to help my client feel comfortable and in order for me to provide them really good care. But what about our existing clients? That is where the session prep feature comes in. Let me tell you a little bit about how this session prep works. All you need to do is click on the upcoming appointment and tell it to draft the session prep. Care Aide builds a session prep page that includes a checklist of session reminders. The topics you may want to revisit, the homework that you probably assigned, and even important dates like birthdays. You can edit those reminders before or during the appointment and they carry right into your session sidekick when you are in the session. You also get a last session summary that recaps the progress note from the last time you met with your client so your prior notes and contacts don't get lost and what you worked on in your last session is already waiting for you in your next session. This brings us to session sidekick. This is a new screen in the telehealth sessions but don't worry your clients can't see it. It keeps your session reminders front and center and gives you two of my favorite quick tools. Quick replays pulls up the last minute of your transcript. So if a client mentions a medication and you're not sure if you caught it you can check without breaking the moment. And session recap gathers key themes and information that you have addressed so far in your session which is perfect when you wanna regroup mid session or set up some clear next steps before you wrap up. Just remember these features only work while notetaker is recording. Now let's talk about what happens after your session. When you return to the appointment page, in addition to your notetaker draft progress note, Care Aide creates a client summary. So think of this as an optional way to add just a little bit of extra value for your clients. When our clients finish a session or leave our office, so much of what we've talked about actually gets lost. We forget about it and we go about our normal lives but this gives our clients something to hold on to and come back to about their session and because Care Aide drafts it right from our session it takes me almost no extra time. So I really recommend checking this out and trying it for yourself but just remember that if you don't save it, it will be deleted after seven days. Care Aide also helps with treatment planning either by helping you draft a brand new one or by helping you edit one that you have already done. From the client's profile I will click new then diagnosis and treatment plan. After entering the diagnosis I can click draft plan and Care Aide looks at the signed progress notes from the last ninety days and the intake documents to build a draft. Presenting problems, goals, and objectives. If I want to tweak it I can type right in the refine box like list the goals as bullet points and then I can click to load it into the plan. Here we go by the same rules as in our notes. The AI might draft it but you as a clinician have the final say over every word. And anytime my clients make progress I can actually come back and rerun it by clicking draft plan. Care Aide looks at the signed progress notes from the last ninety days and I can easily update the plan. Okay one more and this is specifically for supervisors and pre licensed clinicians and it's called Note Checker and it's very cool. When your supervisee writes a progress note they can run Note Checker. And Note Checker reviews their clinical documentation against clinical documentation standards and actually gives them feedback. So your supervisees can strengthen their notes before they ever come to you for review. As a supervisor this is gonna save you so much time and so much back and forth which means that you can spend more time in one on one supervision with your supervisees. Now I know that especially with AI tools, security is at the top of mind for us as clinicians. These are concerns that I have too and every one of these Care Aide tools is HIPAA compliant. Your clients data is never sold and through all of it you are the clinician and Care Aide is just a tool that you can use to support your work with your clients. So here's my challenge for you. Care Aide actually has a free trial so why not try it? I'm going to make sure to link it down below so you have everything that you need. Try it and let us know what you think. Thank you so much for being here today.

Hi, and welcome to the course. My name is Kelley Stevens. I'm so excited that you're here. I am a licensed marriage and family therapist, a private practice owner, and the owner of Private Practice Pro. At Private Practice Pro, I teach therapists how to build thriving private practices. And one of the reasons I am so excited for today's course is because I've seen firsthand how much AI Notetaker has given me time back with my family. One thing I've noticed is that therapists struggle with having enough time to get all of our documentation done. We are busy. We are sitting face to face with clients all day long, which means the only time most of us have to do our notes really is those ten minutes when we actually, like, need to be going to the bathroom or getting a coffee between sessions. I can remember a time when I spent hours a week doing my documentation, and really AI has given me that time back with my family. But one thing you should know about me is that when AI Notetakers first came out, I was actually one of the people that was most skeptical about using it. The thing that I was really most skeptical about is how my clients were going to respond to me using it. And one thing I've noticed really in the last year and a half, six months, is that my clients have become more and more comfortable with me using it. And I think in large part, that has to do with the fact that they're using it in their workplaces. I know for me, I was literally at my doctor's office a couple months ago, and she just basically said, hey. I'm gonna be using my AI. I hope that's okay. And just turned it on and I didn't even think anything of it. I've become more comfortable. My clients have been more comfortable. And one of the things that I always like to mention to people is that you might have some clients who are comfortable with you using it and say, yeah, of course, no problem. And then you might have some clients who are not. And you don't have to use it with clients who are not comfortable with it. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing. And that's really why I love the integration with SimplePractice because I can use it with clients who are comfortable with it, and I don't have to use it with clients who are not. This course is specifically about using SimplePractice's AI Notetaker. But before I ever decided to use SimplePractice's AI Notetaker, I spent over a year researching companies, meeting with the owners and CEOs of AI companies, and eventually, I decided to work exclusively with SimplePractice and their AI. I trust it, and I'm excited to be continuing to use it in my own private practice and to teach you how to use it in yours. In this course, we are going to give you the information that you need in order to confidently decide if using the AI notetaker is right for you. Here's how we're gonna do that. First, we're gonna teach you how to use the AI notetaker and how to talk about AI notetaking with your clients. We're gonna give you an exact script and a role play of how to do that. Then we're gonna teach you how to seamlessly integrate it into your practice. And finally, I'm gonna show you how to review your AI generated draft notes so that you can see what to look out for and how to change them for clinical accuracy. But a quick reminder is that I am not a lawyer and I am absolutely not your lawyer. So when ever you are using AI, you wanna make sure to check with your own lawyer or your licensing board to make sure you are in compliance with the rules and regulations of your state. Thank you so much for being here and investing in your practice. Make sure to click the link on screen for part two.

Welcome back. In today's video, we are going to go over exactly how to use SimplePractice's AI Notetaker. The best way to learn is to try using it yourself. Now would be a great time to pull out your computer. You can stop and go in this video as you want. That way, you can experience exactly how it works. I'm gonna be switching to a test account right now just to remind you there is no real client data here, so let's dive in. After signing in to SimplePractice, we'll start our free thirty day trial of Notetaker. To do this, navigate to settings, then under practice, select plan info. On the plan info page, scroll down to Add ons. Here, under the Clinical Support Suite, you'll see the option to add Notetaker or the expanded Carried feature set, which includes Notetaker. Click Manage Access to get started. One of the things that I appreciate most is that SimplePractice has made this an add on feature, meaning you can turn it off and turn it on at any time. When you're not using it, you're not paying for it, and it's not being forced into your plan. Click manage access. To start the trial, you can toggle the feature on for each clinician as needed, then click save. By the way, if you're gonna be using the notetaker app for your in person sessions, make sure to download the app SimplePractice for Clinicians and make sure it's the most updated version. You can do this by going into your app store and just searching for SimplePractice. Next, I'll preview the workflow and we'll review these steps later in the course. First, the notetaker tool makes it easy to record the audio of each client session, either in person or over telehealth. So in the app, I'll schedule a demo session now, and then I'll click to start the recording. Again, we're gonna cover this in more detail in a moment, but this is just an example. I'm gonna set my phone down, and the client and I have our session. Then I stop the recording, and the audio is converted in a text transcript by the AI. And then the audio is deleted so this file is not stored on my phone. Immediately after my session, I can see a notification that the notetaker is working. I open the appointment page, the same place I typically write my note. The AI analyzes the de identified text to identify key themes, interventions, and your clients' responses. The summary is structured into a standard notes format like DAP notes or SOAP notes. In the upper right, I can click Session Content to access the transcribed content of the session. And by clicking the View Notetaker button, I can see the draft note was created. In this window, I can add directions to further refine the draft. If I'm satisfied with the result, I click load into note, and the note populates into the progress note window. Step three, clinician review, editing, and sign off. This is the most critical step because when the AI provides a draft, it is not a finalized document. Remember, your role as the clinician is to make any necessary edits. Review for clinical accuracy. Add any clinical nuance and then sign your note. AI Notetaker is an amazing tool, but your clinical judgment is really what matters. You have the final say in every word. We'll also dive into this in our video about editing AI draft notes, but one tip I always tell you is to make sure to test this out with a colleague, role play it so that you understand exactly how the workflow goes before you do it with an actual client. In our next video, we're gonna talk about how to start a conversation with your therapy clients about recording sessions and talk about obtaining consent. We'll see you in the next video.