5 keys to automate your consultation as a psychologist

The work of psychotherapist is usually very vocational. However, the fact of feeling a vocation for our work does not prevent certain parts of it from being boring, tedious or even frustrating.

In this case, it is common for psychologists to feel that tasks such as scheduling, billing, and the charges or the transcription of the therapy sessions is not part of the "essence" of their work and makes them lose time. Fortunately, what makes these tasks cumbersome or boring also means that, with the right software, they can be be automated to save time and energy.

Why is it important to automate tasks in psychotherapy services?

Psychotherapeutic care services are characterized by offering a balance between human and close treatment in which empathy is a fundamental element, for a hand, and the application of scientific knowledge through the use of techniques, strategies and tools designed over decades of mental health research, by the other.

This balance between the close and the scientific-technical is reflected above all during the psychotherapy sessions, in which the professional and the patient talk, reach agreements and jointly execute intervention plans based on mutual collaboration. It is true that a psychologist is not like a friend because at all times he maintains a professional role, but it is no less true that

the most important part of his work consists of moments of communication and direct support to the patient, offering a warm treatment and in which the fear of feeling judged is left aside.

Now, for psychotherapy sessions to take place, it is necessary for psychotherapists to take responsibility for a whole series of tasks between sessions, a part which many consider to be the most tedious: organizing the agenda, managing the reports and documents for collecting information, transcribing parts of the therapeutic dialogue, etc Someone must be in charge of doing them, but at the same time, they are tasks that could be delegated to another person because they do not make use of the knowledge that a psychologist has for being one.

In short, there is a great qualitative difference between the tasks that the psychologist performs in order to offer an adequate psychological evaluation and psychotherapeutic intervention, on the one hand, and all the sub-tasks that provide technical or logistical support to the above, but not because they are "banal" or repetitive, they stop consuming a lot of time if the professional does not manage them properly. The former provide much more added value than the latter, although in many cases they are cornered by those simple micro-tasks that take place especially between sessions of psychotherapy, preparing for patient encounters and working with the information they have provided.

• Related article: "10 tasks for psychotherapists between sessions"

Tips to automate your work as a psychotherapist psychologist

If you want to save time and dedicate your efforts to working directly with patients, follow these recommendations and guidelines that will allow you to automate as much as possible the micro-tasks between sessions and session. Now, keep in mind that automation exists in different degrees, it is something relative, and it is not possible to completely disengage from everything that does not consist of meeting with the patient.

1. Use appointment and schedule management software

Keeping track of your patients' appointments and schedules can be a cumbersome task if you do it manually. There are various software for managing appointments and agendas that allow you to organize, schedule and remember your appointments easily. In addition, these systems can be integrated with your personal calendar, thus facilitating the management of your time.

• You may be interested in: "Time management: tips to take advantage of the hours of the day"

2. Let the patients schedule the sessions

It is not necessary to be aware of answering the phone or emails to agree on the day and time that patients come to therapy; nowadays, they They can do it directly in places like your website, or through a public agenda. Of course, in order to benefit from this type of automation, you must have digital platforms designed to allow these functions, such as eHolo.

3. Automatic transcription of therapy sessions

Some tools allow you to automatically convert audio or video therapy sessions into written text. This gives you a written version of your sessions, making it easy to review and analyze your sessions, without having to spend time and effort manually transcribing the logs. It is important to ensure the privacy and security of these transcripts by storing them on secure servers and protecting the data through encryption.

4. Automates the generation of reports and clinical summaries

Writing clinical reports and summaries is an essential task in psychological practice, but it can also be tedious and time consuming. You can use artificial intelligence tools and specialized software to automatically generate clinical reports and summaries, saving time and effort in the process.

• Related article: "How to become a professional in Psychology?"

Increase your efficiency with eHolo

As we have seen, knowing how to prioritize and automate day-to-day tasks as much as possible between session and therapy session is what can make the difference between being an efficient psychologist and not be.

That's why, eHolo can be of great help, since it is a management platform for psychologists that offers software specialized in process automation related to patient care and the organization of work and the agenda, covering all the aspects that we have mentioned previously.

Among its most important functions we find the ones we have seen in this list, and several others: it allows automatic billing and collections, it offers a session agenda so that patients automatically request an appointment based on your availability, automatically apply a reminder system, organize and encrypt the registration information in the cloud medical history of patients, makes it possible to cross the information of your accounts in Google and Outlook to quickly view your calendars and make video calls at the moment, and further.

To read more about what eHolo offers, visit your page.