Our Perspective

If you have ever struggled to formulate, organize and write your therapy progress notes and treatment plans, you are not alone.  Note writing is a notoriously time consuming and complicated process that is nonetheless an extremely important part of maintaining a professional and ethical mental health practice.  Note Designer software was created by a team of fellow mental health professionals to save you valuable time and mental resources so that you can focus on other aspects of your clinical work.

The Note Designer Story…

Note Designer Inc. was founded by Patricia and Mark, a husband-and-wife team of psychologists who were interested in helping colleagues with the vexing task of clinical record keeping.

As a clinical psychologist in practice for over 25 years, I (Patricia) am well aware of the challenges of keeping good clinical records – feeling overwhelmed when staring down at the blank page after a session, writing far too much detail as you try to capture the complexity of what had gone on, not writing enough as you try to be concise, feeling anxious about what you’ve written (usually in the middle of the night or before an audit), struggling to construct coherent sentences, and making it all legible!

After several years of struggling with my own paperwork, I decided to review the literature on proper note writing and began to build a checklist of well-articulated statements and phrases that I created to capture what tends to go on during a clinical hour: I would simply check off what seemed to apply in any given session and then add a few comments to fill in any further details. Though using the checklist was definitely helpful, it didn’t have the quality and clinical feel provided by a more coherent narrative.

It is at this point that my husband, who in addition to being a research psychologist is also handy with computer programming, created a personalized program that would generate a narrative paragraph based on whatever statements I selected. Over time we tweaked this initial model into a prototype version of Note Designer. As I began to use and benefit from the timesaving (and anxiety-reducing) qualities of Note Designer, several of my colleagues caught wind of our invention and asked if they could try it too. They were extremely positive in their feedback, saying that the program helped them save time and also helped them recognize the diversity of interventions they were using in their work. Some said that it helped them track their clients’ progress over the course of treatment, while others said it was even fun to use (a bit like playing a videogame).

With these valuable comments and input from our colleagues, we then added several additional features including customization slots, additional note formats, and a range of preference settings. Based on all the positive feedback and the frequent suggestion that we make the program more broadly available as a product, we invested some further time and funds in developing Note Designer for its launch in 2013. We later developed an online/subscription version (2020) that was then upgraded and expanded in 2022 to offer the user even more great content (e.g., SOAP, BIRP, DAP, Couples Therapy, Risk Assessment etc.), more flexible features, and extensive customization capability.  With Note Designer, the control of your confidential information is in your hands: The program never sends your client notes or PHI to the cloud, to our server, or across the internet. We are pleased that we now have thousands of satisfied mental health professionals using Note Designer for their clinical notes. We hope you like it too!

If you have any questions about Note Designer feel free to contact us at info@notedesigner.com, or at 514 465 6275.

Patricia and Mark