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 fellow therapists to save you valuable time and mental resources so that you can focus on helping your patients.

Our Note Designer Story…

Note Designer Inc. was founded in 2013 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 spending several years struggling with my own paperwork and trying to guide and counsel my students and supervisees on proper record keeping, I decided it was time to find a solution. (It is of course very clear that none of us enter this field out of an interest in documentation and completing forms. We are here out of a concern for people’s mental wellbeing, a wish to help others learn about themselves and to find greater peace and resolution in their lives.)

After a thorough review of the literature on documentation, recommendations of various professional organizations, input from colleagues, and months formulating and constructing content we began building Note Designer.

Feedback from colleagues was overwhelmingly positive and informative.  They told us 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). Some colleagues pointed out that it would be a great tool for doing psychotherapy research.

Since our initial launch back in 2013, we also received great feedback and important suggestions from our growing community of Note Designer users. We are extremely appreciative of all of their feedback as we listened and used the suggestions to further develop and improve the program. We developed an online/subscription version (2020) that was then upgraded and expanded in 2022 to offer the user even more comprehensive content (e.g., SOAP, BIRP, DAP, Couples Therapy, Risk Assessment, Child and Family Therapy, Addictions Counselling, etc.), more flexible features, and extensive customization capability.  Most recently, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence we began integrating a HIPAA compliant optional AI feature into our platform – making Note Designer notes even more amazing and helpful!

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, and the Note Designer Team.