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Dr. Jeremy SharpTranscripts Leave a Comment

[00:00:00] Dr. Sharp: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Testing Psychologist podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, licensed psychologist, group practice owner, and private practice coach.

Many of y’all know that I have been using TherapyNotes as our practice EHR for over 10 years now. I’ve looked at others, and I just keep coming back to TherapyNotes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get two free months of TherapyNotes by going to thetestingpsychologist.com/therapynotes and enter the code “testing”.

Thanks to PAR for supporting our podcast. The BRIEF2A is now available to assess executive functioning in adult clients. It features updated norms, new forms, and new reports. We’ve been using it in our practice and really like it. Learn more at parinc.com/products/brief2a.

Hey, folks. Welcome back to The Testing Psychologist [00:01:00] podcast. I’m glad to be here with you. I’ve got a return guest today who is always a lot of fun. Uriah Guilford is back to talk about AI and its uses both personally and professionally in the two businesses that he runs.

So if you haven’t heard Uriah on the podcast before, he’s a licensed therapist and a group practice owner. He’s also the author of The Productive Practice book and the Head Nerd at Productive Therapist, which is a virtual assistant company that serves mental health clinicians in private practice.

He’s a technology nerd, a minimalist travel packer, a rock drummer, and an incredibly engaging person. If you ever get to hang out with Uriah in person, you will see that. I would make a recommendation that you try to do that as soon as possible. He’s great at it.

We’re talking about AI today. This is a wide-ranging conversation. We touch on the state of AI in mental health [00:02:00] practices right now, and how it can help business-wise. We talk about separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and trying to figure out which AI tools are helpful for you versus just shiny objects.

We talk about our favorite use cases of AI, and we get into some of the philosophical questions around AI and training, AI replacing us as clinicians, and things like that. So there is a lot to take away from this episode as usual.

And if you’re interested in AI, you’ll love this. If you are curious about AI but don’t know where to start, you’ll probably also love it. And if you’re a total AI doomsayer, then I would encourage you to listen to it just as a means of expanding your way of thinking about this.

So I hope that you enjoy this episode. As you can tell, Uriah is doing a lot of things. You can find him at the productivetherapist.com, where he’s got a lot of resources for practice [00:03:00] owners.

Speaking of practice owners, if you are a practice owner and you would like to join a mastermind group to get some accountability and group coaching as you scale your practice, the mastermind groups are starting up again in 4 to 6 weeks. So late July, early August, is when the second cohort of the year will start for The Testing Psychologist mastermind groups.

These are groups where you get coaching, support and homework on the tasks that you’re trying to do to build your practice. You can get more info at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. And I’d love to talk with you and see if the group would be a good fit.

All right, let’s get to my conversation with Uriah Guilford.

[00:04:00] Uriah, hey, welcome back.

Uriah: Hello. It’s good to be here again.

Dr. Sharp: Always good to have you. We seem to have these conversations that center around technology and efficiency, and AI is a big part of that, so I’m very curious to hear what you’ve been up to with AI and many other things.

Uriah: Yes. I have to ask you, this is my third time on your podcast. If I make it to five times, do I get a jacket?

Dr. Sharp: I don’t know what the life stage of this podcast. I’ve had literally four people ask me that in the last three months.

Uriah: Oh, that’s funny.

Dr. Sharp: So I think what that tells me is that yes, there should be a jacket.

Uriah: Or at least a testing psychologist shirt that you send out. And then I’m like, five timers club or three timers club, something like that.

Dr. Sharp: For sure.

Uriah: Awesome.

Dr. Sharp: I’ll consult you on the design then.

Uriah: Looking forward to get those shipped out.

Dr. Sharp: Yes. I know we’re going to talk about AI, but I’m interested to hear before we [00:05:00] totally dive into it, you’ve been doing a lot of traveling and conference hopping. These aren’t testing specific conferences, but they are private practice conferences. I would love to get a quick; what the experience has been like? What stands out; some good ones? What have you enjoyed?

Uriah: I created a resource list on my website. If people go to productivetherapist.com, there’s an option for events. I don’t know if you see this, Jeremy, but I have put events on there. Everyone that I could find, and people were coming to me and telling me about events that are for therapists.

These tend to be not clinical events per se, but more business retreats, summits and conferences. And there’s at least 30 to 35 events on there. So there are a lot of options. And some are very specific, like EMDR focused or something else like that. And some are very specific to certain aspects like how to run an intensive. And then some of the ones that you and I have been to [00:06:00] together are more group practice focused.

So it’s about choose what you’re interested in, and there’s probably something out there for you. I just got back from the Group Practice Scaling Summit, which is a newer one, that was out in Chicago, brought on by Brent Stutzman from TheraSaas and Nate from Navigator Bookkeeping, and that was a great event. I really enjoyed that one.

Dr. Sharp: Great. I’ve not been to that one before.

Uriah: This is only the second year, but they’re doing it again next year as well. It’s nice because it’s a smaller event, so a little bit more, for lack of a better word, intimate. You get to know people and get to hang out with the same people in the room for all the talks versus a bigger event like Meet You in Kentucky, which is amazing, but you’ve got four breakout rooms, keynote stage, and lots of people, maybe 150, 200 people or something like that.

The cool thing is that there’s great resources. There’s great events. You just have to pick what’s going to help you the most [00:07:00] with your practice.

Dr. Sharp: I love that you’ve aggregated them. I forgot about that. That wasn’t a purposeful setup for that resource.

Uriah: Well, I appreciate it.

Dr. Sharp: No, it worked out. I’ll make sure and put that in the show notes because it is really cool. I look through that list every now and again. There is a lot of stuff on there. I was surprised at how many private practice or businessy events are out there for us.

Uriah: The other one that I went to just recently was in Ireland. This was put on by Patrick Casale. It was his Doubt Yourself, Do It Anyway retreat in Ireland. My wife and I went there for a vacation. We were there for a total of about two weeks.

And then the last four or five days, we were with this group of therapists for a proper retreat where, and I really liked this, honestly. We would have a day of talks, working and masterminding, and then we’d have a day of adventure where we’re drinking hot Irish whiskey on the beach and listening to Irish bagpipes. We’re going the pub and, and fun things like that, sightseeing. [00:08:00] And then back to another day of work, and then another day of play.

So I think that’s a nice way to go, especially with the epidemic of therapist burnout. I think we need more of that.

Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. I think there’s a push. That was a big motivator when I started to do my event is, let’s make this a little more spacious, give you some time to actually decompress, relax, hopefully go home refreshed, and not completely wired and overwhelmed with information.

Uriah: Yes, physically, emotionally, and psychologically refreshed.

Dr. Sharp: 100%. That’s cool. We could talk a lot about that, but for now we’ll leave that in the show notes, and let people go check it out, but I wanted to ask. I’ve seen it on your Facebook and know that you’ve been deeply involved in some of these things.

Uriah: Definitely. It’s fun. I like going out and meeting my friends in cool places.

Dr. Sharp: I know. All of our online friends. It’s nice to have these meetups. Today, we’re talking about AI and trying to [00:09:00] get super practical. The intent, at least for me, is not to necessarily talk about AI and testing specifically, but more how does this fit into your life, to your practice, to business, that kind of thing.

I, like I said, trust what you’ve been doing in this realm, and know that you investigate a lot of tools. I’m curious to check in and see what you’re thinking about all this, at this at this point.

Uriah: Absolutely. I think you might say the same. I’m an enthusiast, certainly not an expert. This is not my field of study, but it’s my field of passion to a certain degree. The intersection of business, therapy and technology. It’s obviously a fascinating time to be alive. In my lifetime, in your lifetime, we’ve seen some pretty cool things with the advent of the personal computer, the internet, and now AI. It’s pretty wild when you think about it.

Dr. Sharp: When you step back like that, yeah, it really is. It’s pretty incredible. [00:10:00] I’m trying to think where to start. Maybe I’ll start with something that I heard the other day, and I would love to get your thoughts on this.

You may have heard this as well. I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about the current top use cases for AI at this point in time, and how they’ve shifted. But the top five use cases are:

1. Therapy and companionship.

2. Organizing your life.

3. Finding purpose.

4. Enhancing learning.

5. Generating code

6. Generating ideas.

So right off the bat, how do you react to this?

Uriah: It’s interesting. I think the use cases for AI are only going to expand. We could talk about what the future might look like. I think we probably want to spend most of the time in what does now look like, but absolutely, most people will have their own personal AI, and you will also probably have your life [00:11:00] coach and your fitness coach fill in the blank. All kinds of different agents that will help you with different tasks and projects in your life, including, yes, companionship, which is pretty wild.

I think people are just starting to understand the possibilities. We’re scared. We’re unsure about it, but then we’re also interested and excited. I think everybody falls somewhere on that spectrum of fearful to enthused. You know what I mean?

Dr. Sharp: Yeah. Where do you fall on that spectrum?

Uriah: I picked up a book recently called Superagency, by Reid Hoffman. He’s the guy who founded LinkedIn. I’ve just started reading the book, but he does have this interesting model of putting people in buckets of where they stand with AI. I’m not going to say it perfectly, but it’s doomer, gloomer, bloomer, and zoomer. I think I got that right.

Dr. Sharp: That was pretty good.

[00:12:00] Uriah: Basically, people who are super negative about it; this technology is going to take over humans and ruin life as we know it, all the way to zoomer, which is super optimistic about it, even like, take off all the regulations, let’s go.

He says in the book that he is a bloomer, which is optimistic about AI, and excited about the possibilities, but also like, hey, let’s be thoughtful and careful about this, and yes, have some regulations. I think I would be in that category.

Dr. Sharp: I like that. I would agree with that. I’ve always said I’m an AI optimist, but I like that. That adds another layer. It fleshes that out a little bit. I’m definitely not a, hey, let’s take off all the regulations and just see what happens. That doesn’t sound totally cool.

That sounds good. I like that we’re coming at it from a similar place. I think too, the horse is out of the barn. It’s not going anywhere, and almost like resistance is [00:13:00] futile. That sounds bad, but …

Uriah: Post that into Facebook groups with a bunch of therapists.

Dr. Sharp: Right.

Uriah: I heard you say in a recent episode that if you don’t get on board with AI, you will be left behind. And I thought, that’s bold, but I think it’s true.

Dr. Sharp: I think so. Well, let’s dig into some practicalities. We can start maybe business-wise. So I’m curious right off the bat, you have a group practice, you have the virtual assistant business, how are you using AI in your businesses these days?

Uriah: I’ll tell you one of the things I’m most excited about is voice AI agents. So we can talk about that. We’ll get there. I met somebody really interesting in Chicago, that works for a company that built an EHR for a physical therapist that has a brilliant voice AI agent built into the EHR. So definitely we can talk about that.

[00:14:00] So that’s something I’m exploring, but on a practical level, to be honest with you, it’s mostly leveraging chatGPT and getting the most out of that, that I can, both for writing copy, obviously for marketing and for writing emails making everything that I write better.

I’m also using it for business strategy, like brainstorming and those kind of things, as well as financial guidance. So I’ve been taking my profit and loss statements, and putting those into the ChatGPT, and getting all kinds of things from advice on how to scale my business, to what numbers I should pay attention to, budget forecasts, projections, all kinds of fun stuff like that.

Those are the very practical ways that I’m using AI. The image generation has gotten a ton better, especially with ChatGPT. I was creating a blog post yesterday, and I found a stock image that I liked, but [00:15:00] it just looked like a stock image. So I popped it into ChatGPT and said, make this into a cartoon image. And then I really liked the output, so I put that in my blog post.

So those are the practical ways that I’m using it, but I’m definitely paying a lot of attention and currently trying to figure out how will AI help the administrative side of a private practice realistically. That’s my current project.

Dr. Sharp: I’d love to pull on that thread a little bit. How far have you gone down that path? Have you found anything so far that’s been worth looking into?

Uriah: I think the voice AI agent is the thing I’m most excited about. It’s not incredibly advanced or a wild idea, but it’s very practical because ever since I started Productive Therapist, therapists have been calling saying, I want someone to live answer my phone. I have all these incoming referrals, and I want to match these people with either [00:16:00] myself or my team of therapists, and we just can’t get back to them fast enough. That’s like a perennial problem.

And so at Productive Therapists, we don’t do live answer because we have shared virtual assistants. So it’s not realistic. And the answer up until now has been, well, you should either hire someone fulltime to sit in your office or sit somewhere, answer the phone. But even that is not 100%coverage.

So then we say, you should hire a virtual receptionist company, which is a call center to answer your phone,

but then it’s not personal, and it’s a different person every time. They might not say the name of your business correctly and provide the level of care that you want, et cetera, et cetera.

So now the thing that I’m excited about is being able to install an AI voice agent in a practice, and have it answer the 24/7, 365. Obviously never gets sick, never goes on vacation, and then it can do some basic things.

And then the best part for me is schedule an intake consultation with a human intake coordinator. So that combination of the AI [00:17:00] voice agent with the human intake coordinator, streamlining that client journey, that’s what I’m most excited about right now.

Dr. Sharp: It’s super exciting. I heard you talk about this on Maureen’s podcast, the Group Practice Exchange, a little bit. This is a few months ago. I want to dig into this a little bit. Have you found a specific platform that is catching your interest at this point; ones that have been rising to the top?

Uriah: Yeah. I’m glad you asked. So I tested a bunch of these kinds of tools. A lot of them, they all say that they’re secure. They give you promises about how they handle the data, et cetera, et cetera. But we have obviously high standards both in the medical field as well as the behavioral health field, and so we need things that are HIPAA-compliant and not just put the sticker on it, like, hey, we promise it’s HIPAA-compliant. It’s got to be really secure to use with our clients.

So there’s a lot of good tech out there, but it’s not necessarily geared towards behavioral health or mental [00:18:00] health. With that said, the two of the main CRMs that a lot of therapists are using have a platform that has voice AI agents built in. And I’ve been testing that, and some of my friends have been testing it as well.

So I’ve turned that on. I use it for Productive Therapists, no PHI involved. So I’m not concerned about that at all. So I turned it on for a little while and I tested it, and I can tell about the experience, but it works. I can give you the phone number right now, you could call it, and you could talk to Jennifer, my AI agent.

She would do a number of things, be able to have a conversation with you. At this point, the latency is low, which means you say something, and then you don’t have to wait a long time for the agent to come back and say something. The voices that they’re putting into these platforms, they’re even adding all kinds of nuances of the human voice. Breathing that’s natural. Tone and cadence that’s natural. [00:19:00] So it’s pretty good.

Dr. Sharp: That’s remarkable. So these are built into, you said the CRM platforms.

Uriah: Right. I’m happy to name those too, but to my knowledge, they’re both testing this out before they’re actually releasing it to the folks that use their platform. So I don’t want to announce it before it’s out there. But I know that they’re testing it.

And the platform, just so everybody knows, it’s called HighLevel. There’s a number of companies that are making us a mental health specific version of that. And it’s really good. I’m using it currently for Productive Therapist, and I like it a lot.

Dr. Sharp: That’s great. I’ve heard a lot about that software. Nice.

Uriah: A question for you. Have you had any interactions with voice AI agents, like just calling the internet company or calling anywhere else? Positive or negative.

Dr. Sharp: I have the basic ones. I don’t know that I’ve interacted with any super sophisticated ones to this point, except for the ones that I was messing around with and testing for our practice. They seem [00:20:00] to be a little more advanced. I’ve been looking into it a little bit as well.

Uriah: If people just want to go give it a demo and just have an experience, I would check out bland.ai, and then also synthflow.ai. They have a demo; press this button, call, have a conversation with the voice agent. It’s really good.

My feeling about this too is most people, consumers, will call them; potential clients, if they’re talking to a bot, an agent, and they know it, but it also helps them move forward and solve part of their problem, I don’t think they mind. A connection with a human person that’s going to guide you still feels better.

I’ve been calling to schedule an outpatient surgery, and I like to talk to Stephanie. I know Stephanie now. And so she’s part of my health journey. [00:21:00] I’ve had some recent interactions with voice agents where I’m like, this is frustrating. I hate this. All that is true.

Dr. Sharp: Sure. I think that’s what people, or even me personally think about that. I’ve had bad experiences with voice AI. It’s frustrating and maybe people are shying away from it for that reason. It’s potentially intimidating.

Uriah: Yeah. I was recently in Chicago at this event, like I mentioned. I thought I lost my jacket and I thought I left it in the hotel lobby. And so I was out and about doing something with my friends, and I called the hotel to try to find my jacket. And it was a voice AI agent that was actually quite good.

It identified that I had lost an item. And then it said, I’m going to text you the link. We have a system where you can report a lost item, and it’ll help you find it. And so texted me the link and I was like, great. That’s what I needed. And that’s what they would’ve told me if I talked to a human as [00:22:00] well. So I was like, okay, not a bad experience. So I like that.

Tell me if you think this is not true, but most people calling a therapist in 2025, most people are not going to get a human after three to five rings, right?

Dr. Sharp: That’s true. I hear that all the time. Nobody answers the phone.

Uriah: That’s the main application that I’m excited about. I’m looking for other ways that AI can streamline the admin side of a practice. The problems that I’m running into, though, is some of the tools that I’ve tested, you need to give them access to your email and your calendar. And if there’s client information in there, that makes it all the more complicated. So I haven’t quite figured out how to get over some of those hurdles, let’s say for the practice owner or for the admin team. What do you think about that?

Dr. Sharp: No, I’m in the same [00:23:00] boat because then we’re talking about the security and the privacy issues, and is all that locked up? But the other thing for me that is a huge hurdle is that doesn’t seem like in a lot of these cases, you need access to the EHR to be truly helpful.

And a lot of our EHRs don’t have an easy way to hook into them or connect to them. Some of them have APIs, which is the coding version to connect, but that’s hard. And who knows how to do that as a lay person. So that’s been my biggest hurdle, to be honest, is trying to figure out how to have something be helpful.

Uriah: I know you are talking about the idea of an AI chatbot on the therapist website in one of your recent episodes. You mentioned the integration with the EHR, which is a challenge because they’re not open systems. [00:24:00] There are open source platforms that publish their API, so that you can connect one piece of software to another. Most EHRs don’t have that. I think larger ones in the medical industry do.

I saw a demo that blew me away. It was two months ago. I think it was a medical practice website. And so I went on this demo site. I can’t remember the name of the tool, but you basically click on the chatbot that’s in the bottom right hand corner, and then you can chat with it, but the integration with all the things, so it was a website, plus AI chatbot, plus EHR integration.

So in this demo, I said, I’m looking for a pediatrician for my 8-year-old daughter. And then the chatbot gave me all the answers about insurance, et cetera. It said, well, here are our female pediatricians for children, and then it allowed me to schedule a consultation or some sort of meeting [00:25:00] with the pediatrician.

I was like, that is a streamlined process that I would love. But this is very expensive and these are large health systems. And so for the average private practice with 5 therapists or 50 therapists, we don’t have access to these tools yet, but that’s the dream. And that would be the most streamlined client journey for potential clients. That’s what I would love to create, honestly.

Dr. Sharp: It’d be cool. I agree. It’d be amazing. We do get forgotten maybe, in the mental health world, because in our EHRs, we’re not using these super sophisticated medical EHRs.

Uriah: I told you when I was in Chicago, I met a guy named Jimmy. He works for an EHR called [OTHELLOs]. And this is for physical therapists. I learned that it seems like people in the physical therapy world are a little bit ahead of the therapy world, and I don’t know if that’s true for other medical [00:26:00] professions, but it might be.

So this EHR has an AI voice agent built in that can even make outbound calls to insurance and sit on hold to accomplish certain tasks. And I was like, are you serious?

Dr. Sharp: Wow.

Uriah: What?

Dr. Sharp: That’s remarkable.

Uriah: Yeah. I don’t know how that works or what the effectiveness of that is, but just the idea, and if you can make it work. That’s a pain point; trying to track down denied claims, let’s just say. That’s one of the things that we’ve never been able to do at Productive Therapist because it takes so much time. It doesn’t make sense to pay for that.

So that’s what I’m most interested in, is all the tools are cool, all the interesting things that these companies are putting out are interesting, but what’s going to make a difference for my team so that my team says, wow, this really makes my work better, easier, faster, and I love it. That’s what I run the hunt for. And for myself too.

Dr. Sharp: I’m right with [00:27:00] you. It’s super simple, I’m not sure if you would even call this AI necessarily, but our team is using it a lot for email generation or even email templates or routing who should be answering this, that kind of thing.

We also use it more as a thought partner. So it’s not a specific tool or solving a specific admin problem, exactly, but just starting to build that in. Okay, Anna, look at these three emails or these three documents, and summarize it. How would you respond to this? Something like that.

And it saves what might take an hour. All of a sudden there’s a 10-minute task. And then my admin team gets to just edit a response instead of creating, thinking through and agonizing over handles, difficult clients or something.

Uriah: I like that [00:28:00] thought partner idea. Are you actively training your team on how to do these things, or are they learning it and then telling you what they’re doing? How’s that going?

Dr. Sharp: It’s a little bit of both. I would say probably 25% training versus 75% experimenting on their own, if I had to break it down. I know that was one of the things that we’re going to chat about, and I’m curious about that for you. Are you purposefully building AI into the business now, doing training, and encouraging folks to use it? How do you view this with your staff?

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All right, let’s get back to the podcast.

Uriah: I’m in the beginning stages of that. I actually went and bought productivetherapist.ai, to see what I want to use that for. You might as well.

So every month, we have all staff meeting. And so we have something called Uriah’s AI Corner. So I’m demoing something, showing them how to do something, informing them. I want to do some longer training too, because some of these things, it’s helpful to show and tell, and then have people do it themselves. The simplest use case is those emails that you have to send or [00:31:00] creating templates, that kind of stuff makes sense.

I’m trying to help my leadership team as well, and we’re doing some of this together. What was it recently?

I was talking with my director of HR and finance, we are together, we’re on a call. She was using her ChatGPT account, and I said, well, let’s ask it this.

I’m trying to remember what we were doing, but I was basically showing her how I think about prompting AI and going back and forth, and using it to get the best outputs, which anybody can open up ChatGPT or Claude, and then just ask stuff. But it does turn out that the better you are at asking questions and giving it context, the better outputs you get, and the more value you get out of it. So there’s definitely some teaching and training along those lines.

And then also I’ll mention too, I’m sure a lot of therapists, whether it’s a testing practice or any other kind of practice, if you have other clinicians working for you and you have an admin team, some of those people are not going to be super excited, [00:32:00] like Jeremy and I.

And so the way that you roll these things out, and/or if you choose to acquire it, the way you do that, and the way you communicate that is super important, because on my team of virtual assistants, some people are like, oh, I’m not interested in AI. And then some people are like, I just used it two minutes ago. So I have to figure out how to help everybody get to some sort of baseline competence with this without telling them like, you better learn this, otherwise your job is going to not exist.

Dr. Sharp: Which is the route that some companies are taking, right?

Uriah: Yeah.

Dr. Sharp: In as many words, but I agree.

Uriah: I think that transition, if you will, is super important. So it’s like, as a practice owner, you have to think about why you want to use it? What’s the reason behind it? How you communicate the benefits because I’m a tech nerd, so it’s easy for me to say, look what I did with AI, everybody. Isn’t this cool? [00:33:00] And they’re like, right, how does that change my life? So I’m trying to put myself in their shoes and go like, okay, what’s a pain point in my intake coordinator’s life on a daily basis?

One thing that I’ll mention too that I haven’t turned on yet because my team was like, ah, I don’t know about this. So with HighLevel, this CRM marketing automation platform, it has an AI chatbot as well. And you can install that on your website just as expected, but you can turn on or off the AI component so it can be just humans responding, or it can be AI responding.

And the interesting thing about it is you prompt this AI chatbot to know what you want it to know. If somebody texts or uses the chatbot, I can pop in there or one of my team members can pop in there and take over the conversation from AI, and then if we pop out, AI will continue to respond.

So it’s going to take some testing to figure [00:34:00] out how to get that right, but I like that idea of an always-on communication channel. It’s helpful.

Dr. Sharp: Capturing leads is always a good thing in my mind. Anything you can do to not miss, especially now, people feel like on-demand communication is key, and people wait very long before they move on to the next …

Uriah: Connecting and nurturing, for sure, because there’s often more than one touchpoint, certainly, from a local awareness or brand awareness standpoint. And then also some people reach out for therapy or testing, and then they ghost or disappear, and then maybe they come back. So I think those touchpoints and the accessibility is super important.

Dr. Sharp: 100%. I want to go back to something that you mentioned a second ago, and it made me think about the training aspect of AI. I’m in a little small discussion group with two other [00:35:00] clinicians about using AI and that kind of thing.

They’re both therapists, primarily. And it came up the other day, this question around if we use some of these AI note writing tools that are getting baked into some of the EHRs these days. Does that prevent younger, early career clinicians from learning how to do it well? So are we actually doing them a disservice?

And I think this comes up in testing too. There’s a lot of conversation around, do we let trainees use AI when we don’t know if they’ve mastered those skills analog? I’m curious, have you been thinking about that very much? And if so, what thoughts are you having?

Uriah: What’s the consensus in your group, or is it divided?

Dr. Sharp: I think the general feeling is, it’s great [00:36:00] to have these trainees demonstrate competency in these skills before relying completely on AI. I look at it as a scaffolded approach where we start without it, demonstrate some competency, work through or do the supervision around these different skills, start to fold it in slowly, have some conversation around, okay, what was that like? What did you miss? What felt awkward? What felt good? And turn it into a process versus turning them loose or totally shutting the door, which requires a lot of investment as a supervisor or a leader, I’ll say that. Right now, that’s where I sit with it.

Uriah: So the question is around the professional development of early career clinicians, and how do they learn the critical things that they need to learn in terms of clinical decision making and obviously documentation.

[00:37:00] Right now, you learn some of it in school, but not really. You learn it in practice, and then you learn it in your supervision relationship. So I agree with you on that middle of the road option, but AI is really excellent at teaching; presenting information, answering questions, and analyzing data, all those things.

So I actually think, in some ways, AI would be a great teacher to show a clinician how to write a good note. What does a good note look like? It could replicate some of those supervision conversations, and then maybe some of the more emotional components or psychological components of the work still makes sense with a human supervisor.

I’m trying to think about this because I have two associates in my practice. We have not turned on the AI note taking feature yet, but we use SimplePractice. But I’m very eager to turn it on because I [00:38:00] want to test it out. I’m curious to see what their response to that will be, and what their experience will be like for the first time ever doing it. But I don’t know that a period of time without that, at some point, won’t exist because it will be baked in, like you said. It is interesting.

Dr. Sharp: I wonder how the medical profession approaches it. I have this assumption, I don’t know if it’s true or not, that physicians have been doing this forever. They have scribes, transcription and AI summaries, and have probably been relying on that for a lot longer than we have. And it’s fine, maybe. I don’t know.

Uriah: But weren’t they doing it in the medical consultation because I think it was only maybe like a year or two ago when my doctors started putting their phone down saying, is it okay if I record this for my note taking purposes? My [00:39:00] answer was, that’s fine. I’m just talking to you about my shoulder. It’s nothing terribly personal.

But maybe were the medical scribes being used by doctors after the appointment and they were dictating? I don’t know the answer to that.

Dr. Sharp: That’s a good question.

Uriah: They’re using them, but how?

Dr. Sharp: Is there a skill in writing notes? I guess that’s a question as well. What skill are we actually teaching there? And is it important to being a therapist or testing person?

Uriah: Definitely. There are two AI note writing tools that are expanding their features. One that I’m aware of in particular is going beyond listening to the session, writing the note for you. It’s assisting in treatment planning, which is a logical next step. But then this one particular tool is also giving the clinician prompts before the next session; so a little summary. This is what you talked about before. This is what you might want to [00:40:00] address in this session.

And it’s starting to do more and more things, even approaching clinical thought partner, if you will, to use your terminology. The AI tool has access to all of your sessions whenever you started using it. And so it knows the whole history of that client. So then you can ask it questions about what should I do as a therapist in the room with this person? So that’s wild, but interesting too.

Dr. Sharp: It is. That reminds me of, I forget where I saw this, I’ve been reading so much stuff, but there is some tool out there, I forget if it’s live or if it’s coming, but it takes it to the next level even where it’s analyzing maybe even the video of a session and the audio to determine, are you implementing this treatment model to fidelity?

Are you actually doing cognitive behavioral therapy? And if not, here’s some feedback on how to attend to this [00:41:00] emotion, this thought, this behavior or whatever. Are your interventions matching what the client is telling you? That whole thing. That’s fascinating to me.

Uriah: Was it by chance Mentalyc?

Dr. Sharp: I don’t know. I’m not connecting it right now, but it very well could have been.

Uriah: I talked to somebody from that company not too long ago, and they were releasing something they were calling Alliance Ginie that would actually evaluate the therapeutic alliance from audio and transcripts. I was like, oh, that’s interesting.

So I have two thoughts about that, Jeremy. I saw clients for 20 years and then I stopped. So a decent amount of experience. For a lot of that experience, I had either supervision or I had regular consultation with other clinicians.

So I had support. I wasn’t completely going solo, but the majority of my work, obviously as a therapist, just me writing my notes, just me trying to figure out, am I doing a good job? Am I helping [00:42:00] people? So on the one hand, I think I would’ve loved these tools because I probably would’ve become a better therapist faster. But then also having all this like external insight into what I’m doing with my clients, it feels like an invasion of a sacred space. And also somebody looking over my shoulder.

I appreciate that about private practice specifically was, I get to do the work that I want to do, in the way that I want to do it. And that’s just between me and my clients. I like that. So I’m on both sides of that.

Dr. Sharp: It’s a tough call. I’m just trying back. I think I would rather have something like an AI tool than a real person, making those judgements and suggestions. I don’t know. Graduate school was tough for me; having people observe you and comment in the moment, but I’m [00:43:00] with you.

Uriah: I’m not good at predicting the future, but one of my thoughts is that at some point in the near future, “good treatment” will look like human therapists plus AI assistants, or AI, whatever you want to call it. And then therapists who don’t use AI or incorporate that into their treatment protocols will either be more desirable by some, but not desirable by a lot of folks. I think that will happen. I could be wrong, but I think that will happen.

Dr. Sharp: I think you’re probably right. I wonder if we’re heading down a diverging path; the folks who are willing to embrace and leverage those tools or not. The latter folks are going to fall by the wayside a little.

Uriah: That’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out. I love the idea of AI [00:44:00] making some kind of mental health support accessible to all humans, because there’s a big gap now, and I don’t see it going away.

Either you can afford out-of-pocket, or you have good insurance, and a lot of people don’t have either of those privileges.

So I’m very interested in that, but obviously, there’s the fear about, are these tools going to take over human therapists jobs? We can chat about that if we want to, but I like that accessibility standpoint.

I was talking to my friend Connor, who we both know this recent study that came out of Dartmouth on the Therapy bot clinical trial. I don’t know if you saw this. I’ll send it to you because it’s a fascinating read. And this just got published about a little over a month ago.

To make a long story short, they did a clinical trial with some people who didn’t have any mental health support, and then some people who had unfettered access to therapy bot to chat with it any time of day or night about, [00:45:00] and these were folks with depression, anxiety, and some disordered eating challenges.

The outcomes were really positive. A lot of people liked it. They felt like this was actually a friend, and their symptoms went down by the order of about 51% on depression, I think it was 30% on anxiety, and somewhere around 17% on eating disorder behaviors. And so pretty close to the results of seeing a human therapist.

And so there’s questions they said they were monitoring it very closely the entire time. So they were seeing everything that was happening, making sure that it was safe, and making sure that their AI model that they’ve been working on since like 2018, 2019 was giving good feedback.

I read that and I was like, oh, if you’re a therapist and you say no one can ever replace the human connection that I provide to my clients, well, I don’t know. [00:46:00] Interesting.

Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. It is. That’s both terrifying and actually not surprising. There’s clearly something behind it. Going back to that first thing that we started talking about, that that’s the number one use of AI right now is therapy and companionship, theoretically.

Uriah: Yes. Combined potentially too.

Dr. Sharp: I have two things that come up with this. One is, are those models safe? Because there are stories out there of AI models that are not discouraging people from committing suicide and things like that. You have some of those stories out there. So the safety issue comes up. What is this bot saying or doing?

And then the second issue is, I don’t know that we need to be more online. I’m concerned about [00:47:00] the loneliness epidemic, so to speak, and I want to know the next step, does this reduction in symptoms lead to better in-person connections somehow, or to this person getting out in the world and building meaningful relationships, or is it just a reduction in symptoms?

Uriah: Definitely. Are we moving to a Ready Player One style society? If you’ve never read that book, it’s fascinating. It’s so interesting. A good bit of sci-fi that could come true where basically, everybody is online all the time in their version of a metaverse. I think that’s hopefully, far in the future. But if these tools can help us live more full lives and have better relationships, I think that that is intriguing.

My friend Connor and I, like I mentioned, we were talking about all this recently. He was bringing up the question of, if you have unfettered access to an AI therapist, let’s say, [00:48:00] then does that take away your internal agency to think on your own, look inside of yourself, solve your own problems, access internal resources? Obviously, people with anxiety might be like, oh, I have to have my phone. I have to talk to my AI therapist all the time. That could be a negative dependence, if you will.

In my response to him, because he is a depth psychologist. I said, Connor, AI would tell that client, maybe you should put your phone down and think about this, and you look inside of yourself. He was like, okay, that’s an interesting thought.

Dr. Sharp: I wrestle with a version of that, even in the professional world. This idea of relying on the AI too much, and does it totally short circuit any critical thinking or analytical thinking? Again, eternally optimistic, I’m like, well, I think we could probably figure that [00:49:00] out. Maybe it’s built into the bot, like you said, that is going to prompt into … Just teaching and shaping the use to be more like, here’s what I’m thinking, what am I missing?

Uriah: I just heard the other day that when the calculator was invented, a lot of people thought, this is terrible. Nobody’s ever going to do math. And when the printing press was invented and books were readily available, there was fear about too much reading will be problematic and detrimental to society.

So I think humans adapt. We do. We adapt. This feels different. To be honest, this is not the microwave or the automobile. This is different in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of legal and ethical issues to consider about who owns the data, how’s it protected and how is it used. That’s the part that a lot of therapists are [00:50:00] wary of, and rightfully so.

Dr. Sharp: How are you thinking about that, and how are you talking maybe with your clients or other people, not clinical clients, but customers maybe; how are you thinking about privacy and choosing tools that are being responsible, and that kind of thing?

Uriah: Definitely, it’s a really tough thing to do. I heard this saying just the other day, someone said, vet it or regret it. The idea is when you choose a tool, let’s say an AI note writing tool, make sure you choose a company, and investigate. Ask the questions. Look through their privacy policies. Really look into it.

It’s super tempting to just be like, this is the coolest tool that just came out. I’m just going to sign in, give it access to everything and go for it. It’s important to look into these things. But at the same time, we’re left with mostly trusting the word of these. Some of them are small corporations, some are large corporations, they can [00:51:00] say whatever they want to say.

Yes, it’s in their best interest to not break all these rules because if they say they’re HIPAA-compliant and then they’re not, that could obviously be detrimental to their business model. I was on Facebook recently, and I was looking at this thread of people talking about AI note writing tools, and there’s so many people that are just convinced that no matter what these companies say, they’re taking our transcripts and they’re training our replacements. Maybe some of that is true.

Dr. Sharp: Maybe.

Uriah: I will mention one company that I’ve gotten to know recently that I think is an exception. There’s a guy named John Sustar from Quill Therapy Notes. I got to know him on LinkedIn. He is a really great guy. It’s just him and his wife that are building this AI note writing tool. He has a very strong ethical stance on no session recording.

So he has a way of providing that [00:52:00] service, and a value standpoint on that. Just getting to know him, and the values of his company, I think I trust this person, and I trust this company a bit more than I might trust some other larger entity. So there’s that standpoint too.

Dr. Sharp: That’s fair. It’s good to know those are out there. I know there are a lot of small companies that are not totally interested.

Uriah: They’re trying to be scrappy and see if they can survive, I’m sure.

Dr. Sharp: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I know we’ve been chatting for a while and there’s a lot that feels like we barely scratched the surface, but let’s maybe do some fun stuff. At least up to this point, what have been your maybe most unique or most engaging use cases for AI, either personal or professional?

Uriah: I don’t know if this is unique or engaging, but I’m [00:53:00] constantly surprised at how much better ChatGPT is than Google for so many different things. And so I’ve just been using it obsessively. Like I was just in Chicago, I went to a game at Wrigley Field. I had so many questions. I was like, how old is this stadium? Oh, they have an actual pipe organ. Is that unique? How many baseball stadiums have a pipe organ?

I was just talking to ChatGPT, learning so many things and then sharing it with my friends. At one point, I took a picture of the stadium and I was like, where am I? Of course, it immediately knew, and then told me things about that. I know that’s basic, but it’s enhancing my interest in my experiences and in the world.

One thing that I did recently that was unique to me at least, I really enjoy graphic design, and I enjoy branding. And so I was at this [00:54:00] conference, and someone who was up on stage talking about personal branding and how in the current AI age, developing a personal brand or a strong brand for your practice is super important because you don’t want people talking to their AI tool and saying Pizza near me. You want them to say, Domino’s near me. You want to be the choice that they go to because you’re known, right?

So I’m sitting there thinking, well, what is my personal brand? I’m thinking about Productive Therapist and I’m thinking about InTune Family Counseling. And I was like, well, I have this domain that I bought a while ago. I have this little website called heyuriah.com.

And people do ask me, because I’m this tech nerd therapist person. They’re like, hey Uriah, do you know a good CRM for therapists? Or like, what’s a good Google AdWords company? Or whatever they’re asking? So I was like, I could make a personal brand out of hey, Uriah.

So I pop onto ChatGPT. I upload my Productive Therapist logo and I say, use these colors and this style to create a personal brand for me, [00:55:00] with the words, hey, Uriah. So in literally less than three minutes, I had a professional looking cool logo, and then it started collaborating with me on developing the voice of this personal brand.

I was like, whoa, whoa. Not too many years ago, I would literally email my graphic designer and say, hey, I have this idea. And then one to two weeks later, here’s a concept art.

Dr. Sharp: That you may or may not like.

Uriah: The cool thing is that you, I don’t know if you’ve done this, but you can go back and say, change this color, move this over. Actually, I don’t like that image, let’s add an image of a computer. What I’m going to do next is add a cartoon face of Uriah onto the logo. So that creative iterative process is fun.

Dr. Sharp: It is fun. That’s awesome.

Uriah: What about you?

Dr. Sharp: That makes me think of something I did recently. I had to create a birthday card for my wife. [00:56:00] So one of my favorite versions of prompting is whatever I ask it, or I’m talking, or tell it to do or whatever, I’ll add something along the lines of, ask me any questions you need in order to do the best job that you possibly can on this task. And then it’ll ask a bunch of questions.

So I used that framework to make a birthday card for my wife. So it was asking me, what’s her personality like? How long have you been together? Are there any moments you want to highlight? What colors does she like? What graphical style? Are you going for watercolor? Do you want more photorealistic? And so I ended up with this “handmade” birthday card, with a message that was pretty personal, which is odd.

So that’s one. What’s the other? Oh, I used Claude a few months ago to write a software program that would calculate the odds of my son’s soccer team making [00:57:00] the regional playoffs based on every team’s record, their goals scored, and all that. And so I’ve fed all that in and have run that program throughout the season, and that’s been super fun.

Uriah: That’s amazing.

Dr. Sharp: Little things.

Uriah: Do you know what they call that? It’s called vibe coding. Have you heard that?

Dr. Sharp: Oh, yeah.

Uriah: It’s got an interesting name, but it’s basically when someone with no coding experiences uses a tool like that to make something custom. I haven’t done it yet, but that sounds like fun.

Dr. Sharp: It’s a lot of fun. It was shockingly easy. I have basically zero coding knowledge, but that’s part of the deal. It was super cool. I asked, here’s the problem I’m trying to solve. Write a program that will do that. It did that.

Then I was like, I have no idea what to do with this code. Where do I put this to even make it run? And it told me, and gave me several options. I tried it, and I was like, oh, that didn’t work. Can you figure out what went wrong? And it did that. 30 minutes later, I had this working program.

Uriah: That’s amazing. I’ll tell you [00:58:00] one other version of that, or something similar. So I’m hanging out with my daughter. Yesterday, I picked her up from school. She had this project where she had to connect with, or take a selfie with a state or federal official. This is for her government class.

She had this plan to get on this public zoom call with some state officials, and then take a selfie of her in front of the computer. And that was sufficient, but the call was canceled for some reason. And so she’s like, I’m stuck. I need to get this thing done.

So we stopped the car. I park in the driveway, and start talking to ChatGPT like, who are our California state officials? Okay. Great. Fantastic. Do any of these live in Sonoma County, where I am? Oh, okay. These two people live in Sonoma County. I recognize that name, Chris Rogers.

Okay. I used to be connected to him through that nonprofit that I used to volunteer at. You know what, I think we’re friends on Facebook. So I go to Facebook, and pop open Messenger, and I messaged my local [00:59:00] state official. I say my daughter has this project. So far I haven’t gotten a response, but I really impressed my daughter. She was like, oh my goodness, look what we just did. I was like, yeah, dad points.

Dr. Sharp: Totally. You’re not totally uncool. You know how to use something.

Uriah: Right. I’m working on that.

Dr. Sharp: That’s fantastic. Just as we start to close for today, do you have thoughts, I know we talked a little bit about future applications of AI in our businesses, but any pie in the sky hopes, dreams, things you see coming down the pipe that might be interesting for mental health folks?

Uriah: Not to beat a dead horse, but I think if we can get a really excellent working voice AI agent for our practices, I think that is a game changer and hopefully, eventually, one that could actually do scheduling, rescheduling, et cetera, to just take that admin burden off of either the [01:00:00] clinicians or the admin team, and be something that is so good that potential and current clients enjoy using it, and feel like they’re getting attention. They’re getting immediate access. I think that would be amazing.

So some combination of voice AI agent with CRM, with EHR, that would be my dream. And then I just have to figure out what Productive Therapists will do in that new world, which I am figuring out. I’m going to help people build it, hopefully, or connect the tools, or something like that.

On a practical standpoint, for people listening to this, if you’re a tech enthusiast or just tech curious, I just made that up, I would say go out and don’t waste a bunch of time testing tools, unless that’s your hobby, like me, and you just want to do that, but go out and search for a tool with a problem in mind.

What I sometimes do and what other people do is they’re like, oh, I’m [01:01:00] trying these three tools, or these five tools. Well, what do they do, and why is that important? I’m not sure yet. That’s a great way to waste an afternoon.

But start with the problem and say, what do I want to solve? What’s a pain point or a bottleneck in my daily life, productivity wise, or in my practice? And then go out and find the tool that can hopefully help you solve part of that problem.

Dr. Sharp: I’ll piggyback on that, that that’s one of the places where I’ve used AI to be almost like a coach is, I have said on the podcast side, not with the practice yet, but I think it’s an easy extension, analyze my workflow, like my client lead generation, my communication, my tech stack, my follow up, the whole workflow on consulting, point out any gaps and recommend any efficiency improvements or software that could be helpful.

And it was legitimately helpful. It asked a lot of [01:02:00] questions. This was a 30, 45-minute exercise, going back and forth. So just to say that, if you don’t even know what the problem is, you’re just like, I’m overwhelmed, something’s not working and I’m unhappy. That might be a good place to start for folks is, hey, analyze my client onboarding and tell me what could be better, and maybe you’ll get some ideas on some problems and bottlenecks to work with.

Uriah: Absolutely.

Dr. Sharp: That thought partner role is fun. Thanks for being here. Always a good conversation.

Uriah: Definitely, it’s fun. Thanks for having me. I look forward to the t-shirt.

Dr. Sharp: Yeah, for sure. I’m going to go to ChatGPT and design it right after we jump off.

Uriah: I can tell you, if anybody wants to design a cool t-shirt and just print a one-off, Canva is amazing, because you can design anything you want, and you can print a shirt for $30, and they ship it to you. I did it recently for this conference I was sponsoring. And so you can steal this idea if you want.

I had two custom shirts that I made on [01:03:00] Canva. One was a black shirt, and then it just said, ask me about intake audits because I was selling this intake audit service. And then I had another shirt that had one of my friend’s faces on it, who was there.

And then it said productive therapists. And then on the back, it had a QR code. So people were laughing at the fact that I had my friend’s face on the shirt. But you can go print one-off shirts for an event, for a birthday party, for mother’s day, whatever you want to do. It’s pretty fun.

Dr. Sharp: That is super cool. All the good ideas.

Uriah: Hot tip.

Dr. Sharp: If people want to talk to you more, or figure out what you’re up to, or get some resources, what is the best way to do that?

Uriah: Productivetherapist.com is the place to go for all the things.

Dr. Sharp: Okay. I love it. Thanks again.

Uriah: Thanks, Jeremy.

Dr. Sharp: All right, y’all. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the [01:04:00] show notes, so make sure to check those out.

If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner, I’d invite you to check out The Testing Psychologists mastermind groups. I have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.

[01:05:00] The information contained in this podcast and on The Testing Psychologist website is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast or on the website is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please note that no doctor-patient relationship is formed here, and similarly, no supervisory or consultative relationship is formed between the host or guests of this podcast and listeners of this podcast. If you need the qualified advice of any mental health practitioner or medical provider, please seek one in your area. Similarly, if you need supervision on clinical matters, please find a supervisor with expertise that fits your [01:06:00] needs.

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