Special Episode: Modern Therapist’s Consumer Guide on JotPsych
Curt and Katie talk with Nate Peereboom, CEO and co-founder of JotPsych, an AI-powered scribe designed to automate therapy notes and save therapists 90–95% of their note-taking time. Jot Psych supports over 30 languages, integrates with many EHRs, and prioritizes security and privacy. In this conversation, we dive into how AI can support clinicians while protecting the integrity of the therapeutic relationship. This episode is part of our Modern Therapist Consumer Guide, where we explore innovative tools and services built for therapists and their clients.
Click here to scroll to the podcast transcript.Transcript
Interview with Nate Peereboom, CEO of JotPsych
Nate Peereboom is the CEO of JotPsych. JotPsych is a best-in-class AI-scribe for behavioral health clinicians. The software reduces documentation time by ~90% for therapists, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and PMHNPs. Since its commercial launch 18 months ago, JotPsych has scribed for over 800,000 patient encounters across the US, Canada, EU, Australia, and New Zealand.
In this podcast episode we talk about AI Scribes and making your clinical documentation more efficient and effective with JotPsych
We explore how Jot Psych uses artificial intelligence to ease the documentation burden in therapy practices, while maintaining HIPAA compliance and respecting client privacy.
Interview with Nate Peereboom, JotPsych
“The prime thing that motivates me is the idea of time as being a spiritually material thing. I think a lot of people look at business software or administrative software and they think, Oh, he’s just trying to make my business more efficient. This is a business thing. But…that’s not our North Star. Our North Star is that time is the most precious, finite resource on Earth, and we should leverage technology to create as much time for everyone, patients, clinicians, therapists.” – Nate Peereboom, Co-founder of JotPsych
0:01:07 – Nate introduces himself and JotPsych
0:02:18 – Origin story of JotPsych and why they created the company
0:05:34 – Mission, vision, and values of the business
0:09:42 – Process of using JotPsych and note generation
0:12:08 – Business and clinical considerations for using AI scribes
0:16:14 – Privacy concerns and client consent
0:20:30 – Concerns about data training and potential AI therapist replacement
0:31:18 – Multilingual capabilities
0:31:52 – Quality assurance processes
0:34:49 – Onboarding process for new users
0:40:16 – Where to find more information about JotPsych
Curt and Katie Chat – Our review of JotPsych
0:42:07 – Katie and Curt talk through our impressions of JotPsych: Considerations for choosing JotPsych, paying attention to scope and accuracy in documentation that is produced, how tools like Jot Psych can serve solo and group practices, the importance of testing AI tools in real-world practice before full adoption
A Special Offer for the listeners of Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast from JotPsych
Try Jot Psych with a 10-day free trial and get 50% off the first two paid months.
Visit jotpsych.com/modern-therapist and use code MODERN
Relevant Links:
- Website: JotPsych
- Email: support@jotpsych.com
- Social Media:
Who we are:
Curt Widhalm, LMFT
Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com
Katie Vernoy, LMFT
Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com
A Quick Note:
Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.
Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.
Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement:
Consultation services with Curt Widhalm or Katie Vernoy:
Connect with the Modern Therapist Community:
Our Facebook Group – The Modern Therapists Group
Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/
Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Consumer Guide podcast (Autogenerated):
Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.
Curt Widhalm 0:17
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Consumer Guide, another one of our episodes where we do a deep dive into some of the companies and people that we vet and we like their services and also help to support the show. And we have talked a lot about the roles that AI is coming into the therapy field and the ways that we interact with things, and we are very fortunate to be joined by Nate Peereboom from JotPsych, one of the companies that’s helping to make writing notes and doing a lot of the parts of our field that many people don’t find so fun a lot easier. So thank you very much for joining us and talking about how JotPsych can help therapists in their work that they’re doing.
Nate Peereboom 1:07
Awesome. Hey, thanks for having me, Curt. Thanks for having me, Katie, it’s great to be here.
Katie Vernoy 1:13
We’re excited to have this conversation, and we’re going to start with the question we ask all of our guests, which is, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?
Nate Peereboom 1:22
Yeah. So my name is Nate as Curt said, Nate Peereboom. I’m the co founder of JotPsych. And JotPsych is an AI scribe. So for those of you who don’t know what an AI scribe is, it’s like a human scribe, but it happens on your phone or it happens on your computer. So you walk into an encounter, you click start, you do the encounter, you click done, and you get all the documentation that you would otherwise need to write either by pen or type into your computer. You can also use JotPsych as a dictation tool, but the key thing is that it’s not speech to text. It’s listening to whatever information you put into it and writing the note or the document that you find most helpful.
Curt Widhalm 2:05
We don’t always like to acknowledge that there’s competitors out there, but why and how was JotPsych, why were you creating this? What was the need that you saw as creating a company like this?
Nate Peereboom 2:19
Yeah, so I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. For anyone who lives in Ohio or in Cleveland, you know, it is a hospital town. Everyone works in, in healthcare, the Cleveland Clinic there is there, University Hospitals, is there, Metro Health is there. It’s it’s an it’s a mecca for medicine. And so both of my parents were in medicine. My dad’s a neuro oncologist. My mom’s a nurse practitioner who works in the palliative care space. And so I knew that note taking was a big problem forever. I mean, from the time I was a small kid, my parents would come home, you know, we’d have dinner, then they’d open up their laptops and, you know, I would go to sleep, but they would be still up typing their notes. And part of this, I think, comes from the fact that my parents are like pretty detail oriented people. I don’t think everyone spent as much time charting or note taking as they did, but if you know anyone in medicine, you know this is a big problem. So, I’m not a clinician. I’m really, really excited about technology. I really believe that technology can make medicine better, and I believe that therapy, mental health care, is medical care. I believe that it’s part of the health care system. And so about two years ago, my best friend and I from college started JotPsych, and we had this idea that we were going to create a software that just automated note taking, essentially for my parents. So we spent a lot of time working with folks not in behavioral health, you know, primary care physicians, folks who worked in nephrology. We worked with an orthopedic surgeon. And we built a technology that at some point, like hundreds of people were using. And I remember this moment because, you know, every every person in technology makes this mistake. At first they launch a product for free, and everyone uses it, and they think, Oh, this is this is going well. And then at some point you have to turn on the price. And when we turned on the price, basically everyone left the product, like everyone said, No, it’s not worth that price, and canceled their subscript, you know, their subscription. And I remember being with Jackson, my co founder, when this happened, because we turned it on on, like a Wednesday, and by Thursday, we lost every single user on the software. And I remember, like being, we had gone to do, like an in person visit to this, you know, doctor rural Ohio, like almost out in Amish country, and I remember, like, laying down on the sidewalk with, like my hands on my face being like, oh my gosh, what have we done? We now have no products and no customers, and we can’t even build it because no one’s using it anymore. And he walked over to me, and he said, we have one customer now, and it was someone who worked in the behavior health field, and her name is actually the passwords the Wi Fi at our office now. Her name is Colleen, and she, you know, she kind of convinced us that behavioral health was where we should focus, that there was so much administrative burden in behavioral health that if we would tailor our product just for folks who worked in therapy or just for folks who worked in psychiatry, we could create something that was incredibly impactful to those clinicians. And so that’s what we that’s what we’ve done. We’ve spent the last two years building a product that is an AI scribe singularly for people in behavioral health.
Katie Vernoy 5:34
What are the mission, vision and values that guide your business decisions? Because it sounds like you started from a place where you were trying to support and help your folks and folks like them, and then with this turn of events, this horrible turn of events where all of your clients went away. It sounds like you were able to find a need in the market, but but at some point it becomes about your own vision, your own mission and the values that you have. So our modern therapists, therapists love to know, kind of behind the scenes, what, what makes you tick? So that’s kind of what this question is about.
Nate Peereboom 6:10
Yeah, the prime thing that motivates me is the idea of time as being a spiritually material thing. I think a lot of people look at business software or administrative software and they think, Oh, he’s just trying to make my business more efficient. This is a business thing. But I actually really that’s not our North Star. Our North Star is that time is is the most precious, finite resource on Earth, and we should leverage technology to create as much time for everyone, patients, clinicians, therapists, doctors, to spend that either, you know, seeing more folks or, you know, spending time with their, you know, going to the T-ball practice for their kids, or reading a book that changes their perspective on the world in some, some powerful way. So the prime value that we believe in is that time is, is like, spiritually important. This is not a company that’s just about, you know, cranking out the most efficient business. The second thing that we believe is that human connection is clinically relevant in therapy. I’ll say that again, human connection is clinically relevant in therapy. You know, 24% of people who go see any sort of clinician are frustrated and feel a level of disconnection when their provider is in some way, you know, typing or writing in a notebook. And you know, if you’re a cardiologist, that might actually be totally fine, because the most clinically important thing in a cardiology appointment is actually just that you diagnose correctly and that you prescribe the right surgery or pharmacology, pharmacological therapy, or you’re really good at putting in a stent. In behavioral health, the human connection that you have with a patient is actually one of the deciding variables in whether or not that particular client or patient actually gets well. And then the third principle we have is just that, like clinicians know best. You know, we’re not clinicians. I said this earlier. We’re technologists. We are here to support clinicians in doing what they know really well. What does that mean? It means we don’t have prescriptive data policies. So if you want to delete a note, it’s gone forever. We can’t receive it. You can’t receive it. If you want to save a note for 10 years, you can also do that on JotPsych. It also means that we have, we’ve built the software to be highly responsive to customization. Katie, you and I before, before we kind of started recording, we’re discussing the way that templates fit into the JotPsych workflow. And we’ve designed software that is hyper, hyper responsive to what clinicians are doing in the software and what clinicians tell us that they want. So we have a clinical advisory board that we meet with every single month, reviews every new feature that we push out, and is is part of that feedback process, but at an individual level, we also really believe in making the software something that’s highly responsive.
Curt Widhalm 9:06
I’m glad that you’re bringing up the time is valuable thing, and I say that because Katie and I have evaluated a lot of scribe type tools in our time over the last couple of years, and some of what we’ve found is that in the process of recording, uploading, downloading sessions, it’s sometimes just as fast, if not faster, to write documentation the old fashioned way. So can you speak a little bit about what the JotPsych process is, as far as how it works, in being able to have these notes work.
Nate Peereboom 9:42
It’s super easy. It takes like, two to three minutes to set up. You go to jotpsych.com you click Start a Trial, you put in, you know, three pieces of information, you can click record and start making a recording immediately. Katie, I think you did this this morning. How long did it take you to make your first note?
Katie Vernoy 9:57
Well, I was, I was I moving around. But if I went straight to do a note, yeah, it would have been like, 30 seconds.
Nate Peereboom 10:04
Yeah. And then when you actually, like, click Submit on the note, the note takes between 20 and 30 seconds to generate. We are trying to get that down. But you know, 20 seconds is the time it takes to, like, get up, you know, do three jumping jacks and sit down. So, you know, use, use the buffer time on our software to do something in between your visits anyways. And then, you know, it’s a single, single button, copy paste into your EHR. Now, look, there’s no secret, we’re trying to create our own EHR, and many therapists are starting to use us as their system of record. But we want to make it really clear that you don’t have to transition your EHR in order to use JotPsych you can use TherapyNotes. You can use SimplePractice. You can use Jane. Single, you know, button, copy, paste, plop it in your EHR. You’re done. The thing that we promised you is that you will save 90 to 95% on your notes. 90 to 95% that is the thing that we hear from our customers, and that is the promise we’re making to you when you purchase our software.
Katie Vernoy 11:11
So, pushing out a little bit, because I want to make sure that we get into the decision making, because there are some folks who have started, in my mind, throwing stuff into ChatGPT and not protecting data. There are some folks who have gone down the road and identified some AI scribes that are working for them, and others who are pretty cautious. They’re not the early adopters. They’re not the ones that are going without thinking through all their responsibilities, and they’re not the ones that are saying, never an AI scribe, because there’s all these things, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. But for folks who are thinking, hey, wait a second, this seems to be a real thing, there’s more of these coming into play, and a lot of people are finding really good efficacy with them. What are the business and clinical considerations that therapists can think through when they’re trying to determine, should I add an AI scribe to my practice?
Nate Peereboom 12:08
Yeah. I mean, I’m biased. I think everyone should be using an AI scribe. And, you know, at a clinical level, you know, therapy is really interesting, because therapy notes are, you know, everyone has different preferences around what that note should hold. And some therapists say to us, Hey, I actually want a really slim note, like, if someone is an immigrant, if someone has transitioned genders, I actually really don’t want that in the note, especially in the political environment we’re in right now. And so one thing that I would say is, like, when you want to balance detail and accuracy with really, like, thoughtful, rigorous omission, you know, AI scribes are incredible for that, because, you know, first, you know, JotPsych, for example, you can specify what you don’t want in the note. You can also specify what you do want in the note. You can specify the formatting and the styling, you get the same note every single time. And what that means is that you, you know, have all the defensibility when it comes to commercial payer auditing you or needing to, like, explain rational for treatment, but you also have all the control and consistency over retaining kind of a rule set for what you don’t want included in the note. So that’s that’s really important. I already mentioned the fact that, like, human connection is really important. I’ll tell a small story here. When I was in college, I went to see a therapist. It was my first time seeing a therapist, and he was like the student mental health center. And I remember, you know, walking into the therapist’s office, sitting down with him, he was, like, this older guy, and he had, like, a computer and a notepad, and he was taking great notes, like he was typing everything, he was writing everything down. And I was just in a place, like in my own personal life, where that was, like, really not what I wanted. Like, it was something where I wanted this guy to, of course, I wanted him to take, like, have the data he needed, but like, I really wanted him to connect with me as a human being and make me feel witnessed. Like, I think a lot of coming to therapy as a client is this feeling of being witnessed. And I really felt like a like a head of cattle, like I felt like I felt like this guy was kind of prodding me and and documenting really fine, but I never went back. Like I really, I had that one experience, and I was like, I really don’t like this, and never went back. And so I think part of what therapists can do with an AI scribe is really dial down the friction of that first visit, that the friction of like, needing to get, like, intake information, but also wanting to, like, very much, connect with the client. So those are the most important things. This all goes without speaking about like, you know how to reduce audit risk, how important it is to like, actually finish the note really quickly, so you can submit to reimbursement if you need that. So I’ll leave all of that aside, because I think that that’s pretty self evident and and obvious, but, but those are the things that I would encourage folks who are AI skeptical to think about. But I also want to just like address head on this question of safety, security, privacy, it’s the elephant in the room, and I think that it’s a very reasonable concern to have. It’s something that we take incredibly seriously, and we really don’t recommend plopping a transcript into ChatGPT. Like that’s actually not what we would recommend.
Katie Vernoy 15:38
No, no.
Nate Peereboom 15:38
I think people do that, though. People tell us that. I mean, people will will come up to our booth at a conference, or they’ll call me on the phone, or they’ll, you know, communicate with us in any way, and they’ll say, hey, my model of writing my note is actually that, like, I do, like, use a transcription service, and then I just throw it in, like, Claude or ChatGPT, and I feel nervous about it, but like, it saves me so much time, like, that’s, that’s what I’m gonna do. We do a bunch of things to protect, you know, client privacy and security, and I’m happy to walk through them, but I would just say that like, like, it is a reasonable concern.
Curt Widhalm 16:14
I know, with some of the privacy concerns, Katie and I are both ethics nerds on our end, and a lot of the ethics discussions around this is also about client input into where their data goes, and…
Nate Peereboom 16:28
Yeah.
Curt Widhalm 16:28
A lot of client autonomy and decision making around this kind of stuff. How do you recommend that therapists handle this delicate balance, as far as having conversations with their clients about utilizing a tool like JotPsych?
Nate Peereboom 16:43
100% okay. I’m not a lawyer, so I just want to point that out every state has different policies on this. And also there’s like, there’s the legal considerations, and then there’s also, I think, ethical considerations, which can be like, orthogonal. They’re not always like the same, but I’ll tell you what we recommend as a company and what we’ve seen work. The first thing is, we do encourage you to get consent from your client, like verbally or in written form. We provide actually a consent form that you can use that explains exactly how the data is used and not used. It’s ephemerality or lack thereof, etc. So you know, if you go to jotpsych.com I think it’s slash client consent or something like that. I think that’s URL. You can find guidance on, you know, how to talk to your your clients about JotPsych, what we recommend is just saying, Hey, my name’s Curt. And you know, I’m so glad you came to see me today. I have this tool that automates my documentation. I don’t have to use it. It speeds things up. It allows me to pay better attention to you. But, you know, I’ve been taking notes without it for how many, five years, whatever. So I’m happy to not use it. Would you like it to be a part of our encounter? 95% of clients say yes to that. People really do have, you know, a lot of excitement about about just having a human connection with you. But there are some, some really important things that I would also emphasize. One: JotPsych never retains audio after a session is generated. That’s a profound thing, that we are an audio company that does not retain audio. The way our software works is audio comes in and we we chunk it into these very, very small chunks of recording, and then we redact all identifying information, so names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. We then transcribe those and knit them together. So what we have is a completely redacted transcript that we hold. Then when we actually go to generate any kind of section or any kind of document, we scramble it so that all we’re passing are the smallest slivers of redacted like data from that transcript. So we are never passing any full transcript to a generation partner. We’re never training on that data ourselves. The data that we’re working with never has, like a name or anything that could be tied back to an individual. So that’s really important. We also store the data in the same facilities as like MedStar Health and other hospitals. It’s a HIPAA compliant facility. We have HIPAA agreements and arrangements with every single partner we use. We have internal policies where we train our employees on how to deal with sensitive information. And we also sign BAAs with anyone that wants to sign a BAA with us. So folks who don’t know what a BAA is, think about a BAA as like a legal like tunnel, where, essentially we’re saying, Hey, we’re going to adhere to your privacy policies. You’re going to adhere to ours. We’re going to conservatively and collaboratively hold patient data, and we’re acknowledging that we’re sharing that client or patient data and that we have a responsibility to adhere to, like, the highest standard of care. So at every single level you can protect, explain, and hopefully, like, you know, trust that that we’re being, like, really good stewards of this incredibly sensitive data. And that’s kind of why we exist. Like we exist, in part because people want all the advantages of an AI scribe, coupled with all the safety and stewardship of a company that’s like thinking this through in in, like, the most rigorous, thoughtful way.
Katie Vernoy 20:30
So you mentioned training on the data, and I think that’s where a big, big question comes up for a lot of clinicians. I am never going to have an AI scribe record my sessions, because that data will be used to train my replacement: AI therapists. And there’s a lot of fear about that. That if companies do go belly up, they have all this data they could sell. I think that’s the thing with 23andme or something.
Nate Peereboom 20:57
Right. Right yeah.
Katie Vernoy 20:57
That people are really concerned about and I feel like we I just want to address this head on, that there are the possibilities that this, this data from tons of therapists, is potentially available on your site, or could be. Right? That this is something that AI scribes may have. So how do we address that fear that therapists have. And what are your practices as far as other folks getting access to your data?
Nate Peereboom 21:26
Yeah. So first of all, I just want to be crystal clear, we never train on your data. We have no intention to create an AI therapist. We also, as I said, never pass a full transcript to anyone outside of JotPsych. So that is, like, incredibly important. As a company, our incentive is to reduce the surface area of patient data we have as much as possible. That’s what our lawyers tell us. That’s what we like, just at a risk management level, like would prefer, and that’s part of why we encourage people to just delete their note when they’re gone, when they’re done with it. If you delete a note in JotPsych, we can’t retrieve it, you can’t retrieve it. This creates all sorts of problems, like, for us, because people will call us and be like, I deleted a note. Can you get it back? Sadly, like, no. Like, we have complete hard delete and and we want people to use that because we have no intention of using that data, selling that data. It’s not the asset that our business is based on.
Katie Vernoy 22:25
Does the deleting the note, does that also delete the transcript?
Nate Peereboom 22:31
Yes, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Everything about that, like everything, all the metadata, it’s all gone. Now look others, AI scribes may be training to build their own AI therapist. You know, like, I don’t know what our competitors are doing. Most of our competitors are, you know, more well funded. They have to create a larger business than we do. We are have the luxury of having we’re really conservative about our fundraising, and what that allows us to do is to do something fairly small, extremely well. Rather than say, hey, we actually need to build an AI therapist in order to justify investor returns. We are a small company. We’re less than 10 people. We we don’t need this to be like some huge like, take over the therapy world venture. I think it’s also worth acknowledging, I think we should just talk about, like, whether AI therapy will work too, because I think that there’s, there’s a question on that, right? I wish we had some way to, like, poll listeners right now. I mean, I’ll ask you guys. I mean, did you see the study out of Dartmouth this week? Because that’s the buzz right now, but buzz is that the robot was, you know, the therabot study came out from Dartmouth. The results show that this AI therapist, reduced MDD by 51% GAD by 31%. But I think, you know, Nicholas Jacobson, like the senior author with the PI he said that something that I think is really profound. He’s like, we’re so far away from being oversaturated in therapists. There’s 1600 patients with depression and anxiety alone for each provider that exists out there. I’ll say that again, 1600. We are so like, like, the amount of health care that we as a society need to deliver, and will actually need to deliver more of as the stigma of mental health continues to decline, happily so. And you know, more people outside of anxiety and depression are also starting to, you know, seek health care. You know, I think about addiction or more complicated conditions like OCD, or whatever, the the degree of health care that we as a society need to deliver is just astronomical, and so will, like, a certain portion of therapy happen through AI. I think, yes, I think that the research is coming out that this that supports that. And the commercial payers are incentivized to prioritize capital efficient or, you know, inexpensive form of healthcare. But, yeah, I have some recommendations that I’d like to make for therapists who are worried about this, because I think that there, there’s, like, a certain realism that therapists should embrace. I think saying, like, No, I’m just like, not going to let this happen is, like, not very realistic. Like, it probably is going to happen. But what I would say is a few things. One, it’s going to become increasingly important to prove efficacy of your care. And JotPsych is actually a great tool for doing that. And the reason why it’s a great tool is because you can send regular screeners. We have this automated system where, like, if you are treating someone with depression or anxiety, you can send them a GAD-7 or a PHQ-9 on a regular basis, and we’ll actually plot an objective function of that data so that you can go to payer and say, hey, look, we are sticking with our rates. We are, you know, we are proving that we are more clinically effective than Therabot or whatever AI is out there. And our niche in the market is not going to be that we’re the lowest cost therapists. Our niche is that we’re going to be the best. And I think that that’s my second point, which is human therapists need to be laser focused on quality, because the first part of the therapy market that’s going to get replaced by AI is the the therapists that are, you know, not the highest quality. And so I would just encourage people to really think, how do I craft my practice into something that is delivering, you know, defensible clinical outcomes? The other thing I would say is that there’s going to be a modality shift. I think that there’s going to be certain therapists that, you know, really have a defensible moat around in person, interventional therapy. So I think about somatic therapy, I think about TMS. I think about psychedelic therapy. And also there’s going to be a moat for folks who collaborate with AI, you know, they’re using an AI bot, or they’re using, like, you know, a chat bot that, like, you know, their clients can talk with on a Wednesday, even though all their appointments happen on a Friday. And so, you know, the combination of, like, the human supervision as well as the AI tools becomes this, like, really, really powerful partnership. So, you know, for better or worse, JotPsych is not going to participate in that. You know, we’re not going to participate in the, you know, in the AI therapist world. And so people should feel totally safe using job psych with that in mind. But we do really want folks to see job psych as a partner to them as the world is changing.
Curt Widhalm 27:39
One of the discussions that I’ve heard people make as far as their considerations in not using AI scribes or these kinds of tools, is I sound like an idiot in sessions. It works with the clients that I have. But in no way does this make sense to anybody who would look at it from the outside. How would a tool like JotPsych take, kind of, some, maybe less than conventional practices, to be able to put that into a clinical sounding SOAP note?
Nate Peereboom 28:12
I mean, that’s the magic of the software. Curt, I mean, the magic of the software is you can, I mean, I’ll give you an example. Some of our customers are they’re child therapists. You know, they work with kids and…
Curt Widhalm 28:27
And by the way, that’s totally who I’m thinking about it, not myself whatsoever.
Nate Peereboom 28:34
Yeah, I mean, kids say the darndest things. And you know, you would not expect a five year old who’s being recorded as they’re doing play therapy to result in a great note. And part of the challenge, I mean, with kids, it’s so challenging because, like, you might spend an hour doing play therapy with the kiddo, and then after that, you’re like, what happened? Like, like, there’s so much to synthesize. There’s so much subtlety, and you can’t really be like, writing all the time, you know, like, have to be present with a kid. And our like, JotPsych was designed for that environment. So we do all the part of the magic is we’ve created this layer on the bottom foundation piece of our software that has, you know, really tuned all the output of JotPsych to be professional, you know, to be something that you would be proud of that is not just equal to your note, but hopefully, like, a little bit better. And so if you are curious about that, here’s what I recommend, go home tonight, you know, get a JotPsych account. There’s no credit cards required, by the way. So like, you can get an account, and like, if you hate it, just let it lapse. But get a JotPsych account and sit with like a friend or a partner and just babble like, just like, have some weird conversation. I mean, this is how we built the software. We would have these ridiculous conversations, and then we just see how the software worked with it. And seeing is believing. So I would just say, give it a try. But the syntax, the word choice, the sentence structure, the narrative style. It is designed to be professional.
Curt Widhalm 30:07
How does this do with multilingual sessions?
Nate Peereboom 30:10
Ah, Curt, I’m going to take you to a conference one day, and you’re going to just sell the software for me. Well, let me give a little background on that. So my co founder, Jackson, he’s, I mean, he he’s an incredible co-founder in a lot of ways, but one of the ways that I think JotPsych developed in a really cool fashion is that his background is in natural language processing. In college, we both met at the University of Chicago. I studied Econ and Molecular Engineering. He studied Linguistics and Germanic studies, and he’s a complete polyglot. And so one of the pet projects of his on our software was, like, you can record in basically any language. I don’t think we do Chinese quite yet. Think that there’s like, over 30 different languages you can choose from. We’ve never had someone say, Hey, wait. Like, why? Why can’t I use this language? We cover pretty much anything, and we also detect it. So you can walk in your patients speaking Russian, you’re speaking Italian. It’ll like, figure that out and just write the note for you.
Katie Vernoy 31:14
It’s so cool.
Nate Peereboom 31:17
Yeah, it’s really cool.
Katie Vernoy 31:18
Curt and I are both in California, and so I’m thinking about the clinicians who are speaking with their bilingual Spanish clients, and so they’re going back and forth between English and Spanish, and I think that is awesome, that it’ll detect it and be able to address all of that. It really helps for I think a lot of our practices. That’s awesome.
Nate Peereboom 31:38
Katie, this might shock you, but Spanish was the first language we did.
Katie Vernoy 31:42
Nice, nice.
Nate Peereboom 31:43
Yeah.
Katie Vernoy 31:44
So what are the QA processes? How do you make sure that what you’re doing is working?
Nate Peereboom 31:52
Yeah. So initially, we built the software using a very large repository of transcripts that that academic institutions had provided. You know, for folks who are worried about, like the AI therapist thing, you should all know that, like academic institutions publicly publish just an enormous repository of data around therapy conversations. It’s like the primary way that like research and education happens for this field. So we were able to really pretty easily, like, build a data set of somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 encounters. Now, JotPsych, obviously, is like way larger than that now, but you know, at that time, it was like a really good repository. And what we would do is we would, you know, we’d run our software, we’d look at the, you know, transcript, and we basically, like, try and make our own judgments about whether or not it was coherent. But the real way that we test is with our clinical advisory board and with our customers. So, you know, we have a really tight feedback loop. Jax and I both probably have over 300 customers on speed dial on our phone. Lke, we’re both gonna have to get new phone numbers at some point. Because just like, I mean, I sometimes I’ll take, like, a whole afternoon. I’m just, like, responding to text messages the whole time. And what’s, I mean, it’s somewhat painful, because you get a lot of constructive feedback, but it’s actually amazing, because you very quickly understand what’s going well, what’s not going well. And as I mentioned, the software itself is built to be responsive to that. So for example, let’s say that, you know, we have a family history section, and we miss a detail about an uncle. We get the aunt, we get the Father, we get the mother, we miss the uncle. Our software, if you give it that feedback, Hey, where’s the SEC, where’s the context about my uncle or the patient’s uncle? It will actually go into the underlying model that builds that particular family history section and change it to increase the priority of uncle, and not just uncle as a keyword, but all the semantically similar versions of uncle. And so, it’s the software is recursively tailoring to your particular styles and questions and, you know, sensitivities. So that’s, that’s kind of like, those are the three major ways that we’ve that we’ve built JotPsych. I mean, initially we would actually just record and then go into a doctor’s office that was like a research partner with us, and we’d like watch him or her, like, write their own note. We’d compare our note to their note, or we print it out and hand it to the physician with a red pen. But at this point, it’s like, all recursive and like higher scale work.
Curt Widhalm 34:32
For somebody who’s interested in trying this out, you’ve mentioned a couple of times, it seems pretty easy go to the website, kind of hit record and let the tool come in. You’ve also talked about some of the customization process. So what does that onboarding process for somebody who’s interested actually look like?
Nate Peereboom 34:49
Again, super, super simple. You go to jotpsych.com you click, start a trial. I think there’s two, like, little screens where it’s like, what specialty do you work with, and how did you hear about us? Then there’s a button. It just says, record a note. Click that, click the record button, and then you can just play with it. So the onboarding, if you want, if you want it to be like, just just getting started as fast as possible. That’s it. It’s really easy. Now we do a bunch of hand holding along the way. We’ve got, I think I mentioned this, you know, before the call, every single day, we have office hours so you can book time with me or my co-founder, or someone else who really knows the product every single day. And we’ll we’ll completely hold your hand. We’ll help you build templates. We’ll help you figure out how JotPsych works with your EHR. You can give us feature requests. You can tell us that you actually like hate JotPsych and you wish it never existed. You know that is time. Thankfully, most people don’t do that. But truly, it’s time where, like we want to be these satellite dishes that are receiving, you know, your feedback, and then also, like leading you and making, making sure that it’s just like the smoothest possible process. The the term that we use inside the company is we are a white glove Customer Support Company. You know, we are not a company that, you know, takes 24 hours to get back to you when you message customer support, we get back to you same day, you know, we, we are completely focused on, you know, it’s our responsibility for you to find the software easy, not the other way around.
Katie Vernoy 36:27
So I signed up this morning. I was able to do it pretty quickly, but we do have a special offer, so we want to make sure people go to the right place and use the referral code. So can you tell them our special offer that you’re so generously offering to our audience?
Nate Peereboom 36:41
Yeah, totally okay. So if you go to jotpsych.com forward slash modern therapist, that’s jotpsych.com/moderntherapist, you’ll see there’s a special page where you can start a free trial, and if you use the code modern you’ll get 50% off your first two paid months. So Katie, I hope you use that discount code.
Katie Vernoy 37:03
I totally did.
Nate Peereboom 37:05
Good.
Katie Vernoy 37:08
I got to make sure that I take advantage of this. So…
Nate Peereboom 37:12
Yeah. Exactly.
Katie Vernoy 37:13
So anyway, so talking through this so that you go in, you go to that, that site, you know, jotpsych.com, forward slash, modern therapist. You use the code modern you sign up. It’s very quick, like you said, no credit card. And then you can start setting things up. My thought process, so correct me, if I’m wrong is that, if you’ve got a little bit of time, you go in and you start building out your templates. There’s a lot of templates that are already in JotPsych, a lot of information, a lot of good stuff in there. And then there’s also an opportunity to create your own custom templates, that kind of stuff. So maybe you can talk through what that looks like. Because I’m, I’m still in the process of getting that put together, and so I think once that’s lined up, I did a dictation note, and it was very quick to produce, but not quite the right template. So I’m going to keep working on that. But it’s, it was very quick, and it was nice. I was thinking it through. I kind of talked casually, and I was able to get a note that would be fine to put in my in my EHR, but not my template. So I’m a little bit persnickety. So how do folks create templates? What are the templates look like? What are the possibilities there?
Nate Peereboom 38:19
When we say that we’re an AI scribe built for behavioral health, part of what it means is that we’ve created this incredible template library. There’s over 80 different modules. You can mix and match, drag and drop to create the perfect template for you. When you go into JotPsych there are three ways that you can customize a template. The first way is you can actually just upload a PDF of anything. So you can upload a template that’s blank, you can upload a redacted note. You can upload a picture of a napkin that you’ve written, like the different sections on and we’ll actually go and like, build that. Also, you’d be shocked by how many pictures of napkins we get. We get a lot of pictures of napkins.
Katie Vernoy 39:01
That is hilarious.
Nate Peereboom 39:05
Yeah, so, so that’s one way. We also provide off the shelf template. So when you select a specialty, you know, when you select therapy or counseling, you’re going to get our therapy template, you’re going to get our follow ups template, you’re probably going to get a therapy plus med check template, in case you do medication management as well. And you can always duplicate any of those off the shelf templates and then customize them. You can also, and this is the third way you can you can create your template is you can start from scratch, so create a blank canvas and just again from those over 80 different modules, mix and match drag and drop or create your own module. You know, if you really care about your client’s relationship with their pet kitten, because that’s just like the niche of therapy you happen to be in, totally fine. We have a little tool that helps you create your own section and and you can have that in every single note going forward. And then when you go to record, you just select a template, and then you’re good, good to roll. So it’s, it’s super, super, super easy.
Curt Widhalm 40:01
So we’ve said the name over and over in this episode. But where can people find out all of the stuff that you’re putting out there, any updates that you’re working on and following along with the JotPsych story?
Nate Peereboom 40:16
Ah, yes, it’s a great question, Curt. So I mean, jotpsych.com is the best way to kind of understand our product and get to know us a little bit. So jotpsych.com, that’s the place to go. We’ve got so many cool things coming out in the next few weeks. You know, I mentioned that we just launched intake forms and screeners so you can get automated, evidence based, you know, reporting on, you know how your therapy is affecting your your clients. We also have a scheduling feature, so when you you know, if you mention in an appointment that that there’s gonna be a follow up next Tuesday at five that gets plopped in your calendar. And we’ve got a whole calendar system. We’re also going to be releasing the ability to sign notes and the ability to coordinate across clinics too. So there’s just, there’s a huge amount coming coming to the forefront right now, and yeah, the best way is just to sign up for JotPsych, and you’ll start to get, like, little product emails from us. And if you have any questions, you can also just email me at contact@jotpsych.com, that’s contact@jotpsych.com, and I’m happy to set up time with you directly or you know or answer your questions like asynchronously. So contact@jotpsych.com is another way to get in touch with us.
Curt Widhalm 41:38
And we will put all of those links and stuff in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. I want to thank you for spending some time talking about JotPsych, the passion, the insights that you’ve had in developing this. So thank you very much for joining us, and till next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy And Nate Peereboom.
Nate Peereboom 42:00
Curt, Katie, thank you so much for having me on.
Katie Vernoy 42:07
All right, modern therapists, this is our opportunity to do a little bit of a review on the platform that we just introduced you to, JotPsych. I met with Nate ahead of time, did a demo with him, and then Curt and I just ran through and did a demo ourselves. And I really like the platform. I think there’s some things that I would want to tweak for myself as I continue forward on on testing it out and using it for my practice. You can see the medical background of building the platform. There’s a lot of medical stuff, and so I think for therapists, they’re going to want to make sure that they really look through the notes and determine that there’s not medical stuff happening there, and the notes are long, so I’m gonna keep playing around with templates. But I like it. I think it’s kind of nice to have that opportunity. I did these demo sessions, and then I’ve also done a couple of dictation attempts, and all of it’s pretty quick. And I think as long as you’re able to get a recording, you know, like two minutes or longer, you can get a nice note from it and for the dictation side. What were your impressions, both of Nate jot psych, as well as the the stuff that we were looking at within the platform, Curt?
Curt Widhalm 43:19
We had recorded this episode with Nate before I had actually any hands on experience with it, and we’ve talked with several people in the tech space over the course of our history with the podcast here, Nate seems to be coming from a place where he’s really enthusiastic about this as a tool. It doesn’t have that feeling of a venture capitalist coming in with all kinds of ideas around Hey year five of our plan is to completely change the business model and turn this into AI therapy. So his enthusiasm was very palpable for it being a tool, and I am really glad to hear him be able to address a lot of the concerns that we have, as far as some of our experience with some of the other tools. After we got done with the recording, I got to play a client for a session with Katie, and being able to kind of poke it around, try to test some of the limits. I threw in a little bit of foreign language in just to see if we could mess it up. And it seemed to just fly right by that and be able to get to the core of what was being discussed. One thing in seeing how I was talking as a client and then seeing the output of the note is, this does not seem like something that you can just plug and play for your very first session. You should have some experience with it. You should practice with it yourself. Get some information organized, get your template set up so that way its doing what you want it to do. Because I can see some people jumping into this way too quickly, finding that their first experience with it is putting in some information that isn’t necessarily part of the scope of practice. I was in our play session here was talking about a limiting factor on being able to engage in some physical activities, and so it went off in kind of a whole little medical treatment side of things that wasn’t really discussed in our session. So I think being prepared for how this system works before you’re actually doing this with a full hour long session is something that’s going to be very, very important for people to practice before they do it.
Katie Vernoy 45:48
And just to clarify the recording itself and the transcript that was created, I can use another template and recreate the session, the session note for what we just did, so you can jump in, but you can’t use the note unless it really aligns with a template that you’re going to want to use. And so that’s why, I think preferable to create the templates, play around and that kind of stuff. But if you do record some sessions and use one of their note their note templates, you can still recreate and switch the template to something that’s more aligned for you. And so that’s my that’s what I’m planning to do. I’ll play around with it some more, and if we have other big insights, we can share those in our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group.
Curt Widhalm 46:34
So it does look like a really cool, robust tool. It’s just like with many things you’re going to want to tweak it for yourself. And overall, I like it. I like the direction of where it’s going, and walking into it and just knowing that you’re going to need some practice time is my, my biggest piece of advice.
Katie Vernoy 46:55
So another thing that that’s important to consider is pricing. I think it’s looking at what the benefit is for you on on having these note scribes and for JotPsych, the pricing is, you know, somewhere in the range of 100 to 160, 150. And they do have pricing for groups from 7 to 50 and then over 50 that’s current information. So I would look at that and really filter that in for especially group practice owners who have any clinicians who are struggling with getting notes done or have compliance stuff. I think it would be good for them. And you have to make sure that the dollars and cents makes sense.
Curt Widhalm 47:36
I think so, too. If this was something where I’m looking at investing a significant portion of you know, our monthly revenue and overhead into looking at something like this. I would really do this thoughtfully, and this is one of those things where utilize the free trial to see if this is something that is going to be worth your while before jumping in, because this is a potential benefit, especially if you are working in spaces that do have a high requirement for very detailed documentation, and with that comes the very intentional investment into your practice. And I see this as potentially being a really wonderful investment, but it’s also something where, if you’re not going to use it in a way that benefits you, I can see you becoming very frustrated with it.
Katie Vernoy 48:34
So just a reminder, you can find out all about this over at jotpsych.com if you add forward slash modern therapist, and use the code modern, you’ll get to the special offer, which is a 10 day free trial and 50% off your first two paid months. And that’s exclusively for our listeners. So I’m excited to share this new partner, and I definitely will continue to share information as I play around with it.
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