Telepsychiatry practice uses AI to reduce time to complete session notes by 23%

Clinical documentation requirements can be copious and time-consuming. While concurrent documentation is taught and encouraged, it is a skill that takes time to master – and even when done well can cause a clinician to feel or appear distracted during a patient visit. THE CHALLENGE Trying to actively listen and provide quality care while having

Clinical documentation requirements can be copious and time-consuming. While concurrent documentation is taught and encouraged, it is a skill that takes time to master – and even when done well can cause a clinician to feel or appear distracted during a patient visit.

THE CHALLENGE

Trying to actively listen and provide quality care while having to focus on recording accurate and complete details of a conversation in a note can be challenging even for an experienced therapist. Completing notes after a session has been concluded leaves room for error or incomplete and/or late documentation.

“Our staff were regularly sharing that they felt overwhelmed and unable to keep pace with the documentation requirements,” said Marcie Dearth, COO of Longwood, Florida-based Impower. “On average, they were spending 2src-25% or more of their working hours completing notes. Morale was down and we were struggling with productivity.

“As a non-profit, Impower serves many underinsured and uninsured clients,” she continued. “Reimbursement rates often don’t fully cover the cost of services. That makes efficiency and volume critical – but we never want to sacrifice quality or impact. Finding a solution that would help address all of that didn’t seem realistic, but AI technology promised to do just that.”

PROPOSAL

Impower was introduced to vendor Eleos at a behavioral health conference about two years ago. The company’s AI technology was presented as an innovative means of helping to reduce the time clinicians spend doing session notes, helping improve compliance and enabling staff to better focus on client care.

“We were intrigued from the start, and when we began hearing from other providers who were using Eleos and the positive outcomes they were seeing, we knew we needed to try it, too,” Dearth explained. “In the simplest of terms, the system works in the background during a session, using ambient data collection to extract insights and populate suggested text into a clinical note.

“Staff are assigned a small box-shaped machine that picks up the data, communicates with their computer and converts it in real time to text,” she added. “Staff still have to add and modify details, but the software provides an outline that expedites completion and improves accuracy. It can be used for telemedicine or in-person services.”

Prep and implementation were fairly straightforward, she reported. The practice spent about six months working with the vendor’s development team to customize the AI technology to the practice. Another couple of months were spent testing the system and then training staff.

MEETING THE CHALLENGE

Impower still is in the early stages of using the technology and is learning more every week. It started initially in late summer of 2src24 with just a few therapists in the outpatient therapy department. After some initial testing and feedback, remaining staff were trained and the practice went live at the beginning of October.

“Although it wasn’t legally required – the system doesn’t make any audio recordings – we did notify all of our clients and modified our consent forms to reflect use of the AI,” Dearth noted. “We were concerned there might be some pushback from clients, but other than a few questions, surprisingly very few have declined its use or even questioned it.

“Interestingly, most of the resistance was internal,” she continued. “Some members of our clinical team were hesitant about having to learn something new, a couple expressed some fear or distrust of technology, and several others weren’t convinced it would make much of a difference. After a brief training, some coaching and a few Q&A sessions, we addressed all of the concerns and rolled it out pretty seamlessly.”

The AI has only been available to assist with clients who speak English. Today Impower is starting to use it with Spanish-speaking clients, too. It also is in beta testing for use in its psychiatric clinic; Impower hopes to have that operational by the end of Q1 2src25 and further hopes to begin using the technology in its residential program soon.

RESULTS

“It’s too early to offer any concrete results, but we already are very encouraged by what we are seeing,” Dearth reported. “We have 17 therapists actively using the technology and most report it is helping them to be more present with clients during sessions.

“We are seeing more clinically detailed notes,” she added. “Anecdotally, we are seeing better compliance with documentation submission – fewer late notes – and so far the technology is demonstrating a 23% reduction in time to complete session notes. As the AI continues to learn common themes and phrases used during sessions, we expect that to reduce even further.”

Impower is seeing a decrease in late documentation. Overall, clinical staff love the AI and that is helping not only to improve efficiency but also morale.

“In time we expect that will help us to serve more people,” Dearth said. “We haven’t yet conducted client satisfaction surveys but intend to do that soon so we can compare the data prior to Eleos.”

ADVICE FOR OTHERS

Technology is advancing patient care at a rapid pace – in the behavioral health space, its use is going to become imperative in order to remain relevant and competitive, Dearth noted.

“We already have experienced that over the last 1src years,” she said. “Impower was a pioneer in the use of telehealth for delivery of behavioral health services in Florida, having transitioned our practice to a fully virtual model in 2src13.

“When the world stopped a few years ago, we fortunately were ahead of the curve,” she continued. “Because we had had a fully functioning telemedicine practice, we didn’t skip a beat – and in many ways were poised to readily help even more people.”

Now that the rest of the world has caught up, Impower no longer has an edge, she said.

“As an organization, our focus now is on how we continue to advance its use, and how we continue to innovate,” she concluded. “AI helps us do that.”

Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
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