Hey there! It’s Chase from the team at Redfish. We wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about a new clinical documentation support tool that we’re beginning to implement. In the coming weeks, we’ll be activating a new feature that’s built into our electronic health record system that we believe may have a significant positive impact on both client care and clinician wellbeing (which tends further improve client care, and so on and so on…). So what is this new feature? It’s an AI-powered digital documentation assistant built right into our existing EHR system called “Note Taker.” Here’s how Note Taker works: At the beginning of a session, your clinician will manually activate Note Taker, which will listen in on the session and record the audio. Once the session ends, Note Taker immediately converts the recorded audio into a written transcript — and then it deletes the audio, forever. The written transcript is then used by Note Taker to create a draft session summary note. This summary is never the final word on what goes into a client’s clinical record — your therapist must review and edit it to make sure it reflects the most meaningful and clinically significant aspects of your conversation. In a nutshell, Note Taker’s summary of the session simply gives your clinician another “view” of what happened during the appointment. This can help highlight the most important parts of your discussion and your experience of the session — so your therapist can craft a more thoughtful, thorough, and accurate progress note. Now, remember the transcript I mentioned earlier? Note Taker automatically deletes that written transcript of the session as soon as either your therapist completes the appointment’ progress note, or seven days have passed. In other words, within a week, Note Taker has deleted all the raw data that was associated with your session, and only your clinician’s formal progress note remains. Let’s talk briefly about why we think this system will benefit both our clients and therapy providers: Because Note Taker is doing the actual note-taking during the session, your clinician can give you their truly undivided attention. We’re pretty good at this most of the time, but most of us will also admit that sometimes in sessions we hear a tiny voice in the back of our heads saying “remember this remember this remember this!” - which can sometimes make it challenging to be fully present and engaged with our client. Note Taker gives your therapist the opportunity to focus fully on you and your needs, without worrying about capturing every detail while you talk. We believe this will help us provide even more effective clinical services in each session, leading to better client outcomes, faster. In addition to this, keeping up with clinical documentation is an invisible but profound point of stress in the mental health field. Ensuring that each client’s session notes are effectively tracking client progress, new concerns that come up, while also meeting the criteria needed for insurance billing in particular can sometimes add another 1-2 hours of work for every two to four sessions a therapist provides. By integrating a tool like Note Taker, our clinicians will be able to get a significant jump start in documenting every session note, which will save clinicians time and energy that can be redirected toward actual client care. Lastly, we want to address some key points of concern that our own team assessed prior to getting started with this tool. First off, know that at Redfish, client privacy and clinical records security are some of our absolute top priorities. These things are essential in building trust between clients and therapists. So, let’s cover a few final points: 
First, Note Taker doesn’t use any session data to “learn,” or “get smarter,” and it never keeps anything long-term. It only processes your session to help your therapist do what they already do — just more efficiently. Additionally, as mentioned before, Note Taker is integrated into our electronic clinical data system, meaning it’s fully “locked in the box” and is compliant with privacy and security standards according to HIPAA. Second, and importantly — use of this feature is optional. Before Note Taker is ever used in any client’s sessions, a consent form must be signed giving that client’s approval for Note Taker to be utilized. Third, you can opt out from the use of Note Taker at any time - even temporarily. As we mentioned previously, your therapist must manually turn on Note Taker for every session — it never “just starts listening.” They can also turn it off at any point, once it’s been activated.
 In summary, we’re excited about the potential benefits this new tool can bring to our clients’ and clinical staff’s experience of therapy work every day. We know too that you may have questions about this tool, so please don’t hesitate to talk with your Redfish therapist about it or email our team at office@redfishcounseling.com to discuss this further. Thanks. [End]