Mental health documentation is a different kind of burden. After six emotionally demanding sessions, writing six detailed progress notes isn't just time-consuming. It requires re-entry into clinical material that the mind has already begun to process and release.
Doximity Scribe can significantly reduce that burden. But it works best when configured for the formats and conventions of mental health practice, rather than used out of the box as a general medical scribe. Build a custom template for your note format
Scribe's built-in templates are designed for common medical encounter types. Mental health progress notes, intake evaluations, and psychiatric assessments have different structures. The most important setup step is building a custom template that reflects the format you actually use. If you write DAP notes, build a template with Data, Assessment, and Plan as the primary sections. If you use SOAP format for psychiatric encounters, use that. You create the structure once and Scribe applies it every time, which is more reliable than describing the format in your dictation and hoping Scribe interprets it correctly.
Write a prompt that reflects your clinical context
Custom prompts let you specify how Scribe handles your dictation before generating a note. For mental health practice, a useful prompt might specify the note format, indicate that risk assessment language should be included when the session content warrants it, and set the appropriate clinical formality for your documentation style.
You write the prompt once. Scribe applies it to every note you generate until you change it.
How to dictate a session effectively
You don't need to dictate during the session. Most clinicians find it more natural to dictate a narrative summary immediately afterward: two to three minutes of spoken clinical language covering what the patient presented with, what interventions were used, how the patient responded, and what the plan is for the next session.
Speak in complete clinical sentences rather than shorthand. "The patient demonstrated significant distress when discussing the relationship with her mother, which appears connected to the core presenting schema" gives Scribe substantially more to work with than "distressed, talked about mom, schemas." The more clinical substance is in your dictation, the less you'll need to add during review.
Risk documentation: always a manual review
Suicide risk assessment, self-harm documentation, and safety planning language must be reviewed manually on every note where they're clinically relevant. Scribe captures what you dictate, but the specificity, completeness, and legal defensibility of risk documentation is your responsibility regardless of the tool generating the draft.
Build a habit of reviewing the risk and safety section first on any note where these topics came up. Smart Edits' "Suggest a change" field can add or refine specific language without requiring you to rewrite the section manually. Use Smart Edits and Refine with Ask for mental health-specific adjustments
After Scribe generates a note, Smart Edits handles common adjustments quickly. "More Detailed" is useful when a session covered significant clinical ground that needs fuller documentation. "More Concise" helps when a brief check-in note ran longer than warranted. "Suggest a change" lets you describe specific adjustments, such as reframing a clinical observation or adding a section that didn't make it into the dictation.
For deeper edits, "Refine with Ask" connects your note to Doximity Ask. You can ask for a patient summary, request that a section be rewritten for a treatment team referral, or work through changes conversationally. Mental health notes often require more nuanced editing than one-tap adjustments can handle, and Refine with Ask is where that work happens. The broader case
Mental health clinicians carry both the cognitive load of complex clinical work and the emotional weight of that work. Doximity Scribe won't replace the clinical judgment that makes a good mental health note good. But it handles the structural work of drafting, formatting, and organizing, so your energy goes into the content that actually matters.
