This Black Therapist’s AI-Powered Notes Writer Is Tackling Clinician Burnout
Dr. Dionne Mahaffey has developed an AI-powered platform, Behavioral Health Notes, to decrease the time mental health professionals spend recording notes.
The Need For Efficiency in Mental Health Documentation
The mental health sector has long faced challenges related to clinician burnout, increased by time-consuming administrative tasks.
According to a recent report by Accenture, using AI in healthcare could save up to $150 billion annually by 2026, mainly by reducing such inefficiencies.
A solution was needed for mental health professionals, where documentation can extend into personal time.
Introducing Behavioral Health Notes
Dr. Mahaffey, a noted entrepreneur with technology and mental health expertise, developed Behavioral Health Notes in response to this need.
This AI-powered platform is designed to ease the burden of clinical documentation. The platform offers an interface where therapists can generate progress notes in seconds.
Therapists can quickly produce compliant reports by entering session details or using the speech-to-text feature. They can choose from standardized formats like SOAP, DAP, or BIRP.
A key feature of Behavioral Health Notes is its adherence to HIPAA’s privacy protocols, ensuring that no Protected Health Information (PHI) is retained, transmitted, or stored on the platform.
This allows clinicians to control their notes, which reside only within their HIPAA-compliant Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems.
A Tool Born From Personal Experience
Dr. Mahaffey, who also writes code, initially created Behavioral Health Notes for her practice to help her colleagues mitigate burnout by streamlining the documentation process.
“Initially, I developed Behavioral Health Notes as a tool for my private practice because I wanted to help my associate therapists reduce burnout by streamlining progress note writing,” Mahaffey said, according to Black Enterprise.
“Behavioral Health Notes just lets me enter my shorthand, and it then transforms it into comprehensive, complaint narrative clinical reports in mere seconds. It also follows HIPAA’s privacy protocols, which is very important.”
Encouraged by these results, she expanded the platform to be accessible to the broader public, embodying her commitment to improving mental health care.
