Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:00)
Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. I’m glad to be here with you today for a business episode about report writing topic. We really can’t tackle enough, but before we dive in today, I wanted to share something big. This is something that I have been quietly building for years and is finally coming to fruition in the next couple of months. For those of you who’ve been with me for a long time, you know that this podcast has always been about
helping testing psychologists run better, smoother, hopefully more fulfilling practices, right? Over time though, I think the gaps are becoming obvious to me, at least. people are listening and learning and getting inspired, but then hitting the same walls over and over the walls of implementation and accountability and structure and support and actually putting the ideas into practice. So today,
for the very first time on the podcast. I want to introduce Kraft. Kraft is a brand new membership community designed specifically for testing psychologists who want to actually apply what you learn here. It’s not just about consuming ideas. We’re going to build systems, build confidence, and hopefully build practices that feel intentional instead of reactive. So here’s what Kraft is not.
it is not another course. It is not another massive content library that you’ll never touch. it’s not another overwhelming online community with 10 different channels that you’ll mute and forget about or ignore in two weeks. ⁓ craft is about action, plain and simple. Every quarter we’re going to have a focused implementation sprint. So these are things like tightening your workflows, modernizing reports,
leveling leveling up business operations or finally getting your finances dialed in. You’ll get templates, step-by-step guidance, live working sessions with me personally, where we walk through real practice changes and challenges in real time. You’ll also get regular live coaching calls and coworking time. You’ll also get a community.
of like-minded folks who are headed in the same direction and want that accountability and connection that can be so hard to find these days. Craft is also built for sustainability. All right. There’s no busy work. There’s no fluff. Like I said, this is not going to be a huge content library that’s overwhelming and confuses you from the very beginning. Everything inside craft exists to help you reclaim time.
reduce your chaos and move your practice forward with intention. Enrollment opens soon. And because this is the first launch, the founding members will get early access pricing and some additional little perks that I won’t be offering in future launches or open, open carts. If you want to get on that early list and be the first to know when the doors open, you can go to the testingpsychologist.com slash craft.
and sign up again. That’s the testing psychologist.com slash craft to get on the wait list and be the first to get notified when the door is open for this founding members launch. I’ve been waiting a long time to talk about this and I’m excited. ⁓ I’m honestly a little nervous and I think it’s going to change the way many of you practice and the way that I approach my coaching and consulting.
I’m super excited.
All right, on to today’s episode. Today, like I said, we are talking about something that quietly drains more time and mental energy than just about anything else in our field. And that is report writing. I hear this from every corner of my community. Essentially my reports take forever. I hate report writing. I’m stuck writing at night or on the weekends. And if I could just reduce my report writing time, I’d love this job even more. So the good news is that you can.
And we’re going to explore why psychologists overwrite what the research says, stakeholders or our audience actually reads and practical ways to make your report both shorter and stronger. Let’s get to it.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (04:40)
Okay folks, we are back and talking about report writing. A couple things before we get going. One, full disclosure, as many of you know, I am a co-founder of Reverb, which is an AI report writing platform for psychologists. I will mention this tool, but I’ll also talk about other tools, but I just want to be transparent and disclose my interest in that company. The second thing is that much of this information, I think, is going to feel familiar.
But I’ll be honest, I’m still struck by how many folks are either unaware of or unable slash unwilling to act on this information. So I think it bears repeating. the literature indicates that writing reports is continues to be one of the most time intensive processes for psychologists. ⁓ for example, I mean, one survey of neuropsychologists noted that, I mean, many spend, you know, between five and 10 hours per report. I know they’re,
several of you out there from working with you and talking with you that spend upwards of 10 hours, maybe even 20 hours, maybe even 30 hours. So there’s a ton of information out there that would say that while we invest the time, many of our stakeholders or audiences do not read the entirety of those reports. So we’re spending more time than ever creating these documents that may not get.
fully read and in all likelihood according to the research ⁓ are not getting fully read. So no wonder we’re exhausted. Question is, why do we do this? Now there’s a ton of information out there about why we might do this. know, Stephanie Nelson has done great work on this and led workshops and presentations and groups and all kinds of things. So you can go check out her resources if you
I want to dive deeper into this. So I’m just kind of reframing everything that she has said and you know, things we’ve talked about on the podcast before, but essentially, you know, there are a few things I think that we can ⁓ point to. One of those is just training culture, right? So the field of neuropsychology and report writing started back in the fifties or sixties and it came out of hospitals, right? And that’s when we had to rely on other physicians to
explain the results of our evaluations. And so we had to write these lengthy detailed reports so that another clinician, like a physician in a different field entirely would be able to explain the results to a patient without us even being involved in that process. But I think it just kind of snowballed from there. And, you know, those original folks ended up training more folks who trained more folks who train more folks and so on down the line where
we essentially just do what our advisors and supervisors from grad school and practicum experiences do. And what that equals most of the time is that most of us were trained to produce these exhaustive narratives to prove our competence. at least for me, and I think for many people in grad school, quantity equals quality or equaled quality. another way to phrase that will be length equaled rigor.
And I just don’t think this is true. And the research would say the same. The second thing is a fear of judgment. So I think a lot of us worry that if an attorney or another psychologist or, gosh, maybe our grad school advisor somehow would read our reports, brevity is going to look like laziness. I hear this all the time for my consulting clients. You know, if I shorten the report, my,
audience that somebody is going to think that I took a shortcut or I cheated. But the thing is the available data suggests that the real concern actually might lie elsewhere. So in a survey of referral sources to neuropsychologists, the most valued sections were the diagnosis impressions and the recommendations. ⁓ many of the less read sections included like detailed cognitive domain descriptions, behavioral observations, and even the history. Okay.
So even though we think we need to include this information in the narrative of the report, the data would certainly suggest otherwise. And then the third thing that I think contributes to this is just lack of templates or like automation in our report writing process. So if you’re starting every report from scratch, you’re always going to be wasting time on formatting and repetitive phrasing and things like that.
I know that there are folks out there who are starting every report from scratch and it’s okay. We got to, I have some ideas to help you out, but, that is part of the deal as well. ⁓ we’re just overriding and spending way too much time on this task. So let me take a minute to talk about what the stakeholders or our audience, ⁓ actually reads in these reports. So I think the, kind of preeminent study,
on this topic was written by Karen Postle, Keira Armstrong and others back in 2018 where they surveyed a ton of stakeholders, referral sources, educators, parents, et cetera. And what the referral sources reported is that they valued, again, the diagnosis and impressions and the recommendation sections the most. On the flip side, the detailed histories, the behavioral observations,
descriptions of the cognitive domains, they were rated as far less useful in our reports. And unfortunately, in a lot of the reports that I’ve seen and the reports that I wrote for many years, those less read sections are the sections that make up the bulk of the report. So this is the 80-20 principle in action where it goes both ways. It’s basically like 80 % of the report
traditional reports that we write are essentially useless and there’s only 20 percent that’s you know good or valuable. And so again a large portion of the value actually comes from a relatively small portion of the report at least as most reports stand right now. So the question becomes how do we honor clinical integrity while writing for real world readers. So let’s talk about that.
core principles for efficient reports that actually communicate what we want them to, to the people we want to communicate to. So principle number one, clarity over comprehensiveness. Your goal here is to communicate, not to archive. I really liked this phrase when I was generating, you know, the script quote unquote for this episode. I really latched onto this. So the goal is to communicate, not
to archive. So if a piece of data does not influence interpretation or recommendations, it probably doesn’t belong. And I’m not talking about test data, OK? Just to be super clear, I think we should include all the scores. We have to include all the scores. But I’m talking about sort of extraneous history or information. Maybe it’s observations. A lot of this information gets thrown into a report and I think just ends up confusing people.
So we’re trying to be clear, not necessarily comprehensive, quote unquote. Second thing is try to chunk your information visually as much as you can. So this just means like using tables, bulleted lists, headings. There’s a ton of research out there on readability and what makes a good readable report. But the basics is just research on task switching and productivity.
highlights that there is a ton of cognitive time lost when people are jumping between tasks. Okay. And that essentially means like transitioning from one piece of information to another, moving between sections of report. Even that would, would be considered task switching. So, do the best that you can to chunk the information visually and keep it as simple as possible. The third thing is just like simply using plain language. We get caught up in jargon a lot.
Yes, I know that there are practice settings and audiences that actually value jargon. I’m not saying you cannot write at a higher reading level and use big fancy words. We all love our big fancy words, but plain language is huge. So do your best to replace jargon with accessible phrasing. Okay. So instead of something like quote, executive dysfunction impacting task initiation and planning, just say something like quote,
trouble getting started and organizing work. So much easier to understand. Uh, sounds a lot less fancy, but in my mind it’s a lot quicker and simpler for your audience to take in. the idea of writing for each audience. Okay. So this is essentially nodding to the idea that you can tailor your reports. Okay. I’m not saying everybody needs to write these simplified version. So if you’re doing a court ordered forensic eval,
It will need more citation than perhaps a school referral, you know, ADHD report. Okay. You can tailor your scope to the context, but just be mindful of the scope and the context, right? Don’t do a one size fits all thing. And especially don’t do, you know, one size fits all when that one size happens to be a jargony, lengthy, dense, comprehensive report.
Okay, so how about some tactics? Let’s talk about tactics to actually cut your writing time. First thing, can you front load your interpretation? What do I mean by this? Can you draft your conceptual summary right after the testing before scoring fatigue and writing fatigue sets in? And this might be as simple as just making a few bulleted notes on a document and
jotting down some thoughts, maybe a little mind map, but do some kind of conceptual summary right after you get your scoring done before you get totally fatigued. Another option is that you can use quote unquote modular templates. So this just refers to the idea that you can create report templates that has a skeleton or outline of your report content.
You can do this in Word, Google Docs. You could take it even further and create sort of like modular text sections for the information that you repeat in the report or include in most of your reports. This is that templated text that doesn’t really change or kind of static text that stays the same from report to report. You could use something like Text Expander to record and insert these common phrases and paragraphs that you use.
You could level up and use something like Bastion GPT, which is an AI program, or you could use something like Reverb, which is again, an all-in-one kind of AI platform. So you can insert like pre-approved phrasing instead of rewriting or writing everything from scratch. So modular templates go a long way. So this is for you folks who may not have any kind of template whatsoever.
Let’s see, what else? You can do voice dictation or AI drafting. So I tried to find a peer reviewed study, you know, about, dictation, reducing writing time. I couldn’t find anything great, but many practitioners do report like substantial time savings via dictation and automation. Right? So when I say AI drafting, this would be something like, utilizing AI to record and transcribe.
say an intake session or a feedback session, and then running that transcription through an AI program to generate a coherent organized narrative. Now, of course, you have to use those tools with caution and verify the output anytime you bring AI into the picture. Another thing that you could do, and this is maybe the biggest one that I see just from talking with folks and even talking with reverb customers, is consider just using tables for your scores.
Okay, so I am not a fan of putting scores and numbers and percentiles in the narrative text of a report. But if you must include scores or test results in the body of the report, again, which I would not recommend, just put them as an appendix at the end of the report. But if you have to put those scores or test results in the body of the report, maybe think about replacing that narrative with a table.
Okay. Cause that’s going to improve reability. And again, feedback from stakeholders would say that this is much more in alignment with what they want. The last thing I’m going to say, this gets into time management, which is a whole topic in and of itself. I’ve done a lot of episodes on this, but you know, batching your writing time. So anything you can do to minimize the task switching between cases is great. So
Task switching is really tough. There are very measurable, I think someone who is at Cal Newport calls it cognitive residue or attention residue. Anyway, there’s a cost to switching tasks back and forth. as much as you can, batch right, stay on the same case and. ⁓
carve out those blocks of time to give yourself adequate time to actually get meaningful work done. For most people, that’s going to be at least two hours. For me, I need a good two to three hour chunk. So I think if you apply even two of these, you could take back hours per report. So you can go back, maybe listen to that last five minutes or so again, and pick the one or two things that feel actionable for you and give it a try over the next couple of weeks.
Now I don’t want to pretend that this is going to be an easy transition for folks. I think a lot of people out there, at least from the folks that I talked to, kind of, you know, quote unquote, know what they should do, but the mindset component really comes into play. All right. So this requires a big mindset shift for a lot of us. And again, I went through this myself. Like I was trained in that model in grad school where we wrote 30, 40, 50 page reports. And I did that for,
at least five or six years after getting my degree. I was very lucky to find a neuropsych supervisor who sent me in a different direction. But this is a huge mindset shift for a lot of us from this whole idea that quantity equals quality. I don’t think that’s true. So a shorter report is not a lazier report. I actually think it’s a smarter one. In my mind,
If you can’t say something simply and concisely, then you actually don’t understand the concept well enough. So I challenge myself and my clinicians and trainees to say things as simply as possible and still communicate the important information. And again, as the Karen Postle et al survey concluded, neuropsychologists invest considerable time in writing reports that referral sources may not fully read. So this is
I think really like a head heart kind of issue where many of us maybe know the data and know that stakeholders are not reading a lot of this report. And yet we continue to write these lengthy, lengthy reports in spite of the evidence because our hearts are telling us, you know, that we have to write that way or we’re going to lose all our referral sources if we don’t write that way, you know, on that kind of thing. So I want to kind of in this little section by
debunking a myth of sorts, which is that thoroughness equals competence. Okay. Again, in reality, I think that competence equals clarity. Okay. A reader can only implement what they understand. And many of us are again, overriding and just packing our reports full of too much information that just overwhelms people. All right. So let me talk about ethics and liability a little bit. Some of you may be asking,
this question. I want to be clear brevity should never sacrifice documentation of essential information. Okay. So our ethics code, you know, standards in the assessment section mandate that reports contain sufficient information to support findings and recommendations. So cutting the fluff is fine. Cutting the data that’s relevant to interpretation is not. Okay. So this is why, at least in our reports, we
title, the background and history relevant background. This is where we include the information that we deem important and essentially important enough to include. All right. This is also why I still advocate for including all of the scores in your report. Just put them in tables and put them in an appendix at the end of the report. So that way you are still including like all of the relevant data that someone might use to, you know,
justify or double check your conclusions. you just don’t like muddy up the, the narrative part of the report with all those numbers and explanations. let’s see, I think that, that process applies or that principle applies to any other sections of the report too, that you don’t want to kind of get in the way. so if you find yourself saying, Hey, this information is really important. I want to make sure to include it and make sure people are aware of it, but
It’s not like essential for the interpretation and conceptualization and recommendations. ⁓ Just put it as an appendix and put it at the end of the report. That way people can still access it. But again, it does not clutter up the body of the main report. So I’ve talked a little bit about tools and technology that can help in this whole process. Obviously I have an interest in promoting reverb. It’s an AI assisted report writing program that keeps
content, HIPAA secure, it’s got a lot of customization options. It is kind of a top tier option though, for somebody who wants to go all in and like invest pretty heavily in an AI solution. And there are, that’s not for everybody, right? So there are many other options I think that can help. So dictation software can be great. There’s often a learning curve, but once you get it down, it can be super helpful and cut down a lot of time. That could be like Dragon, or you could use your computer’s built in dictation services. Even something like Grammarly,
you know, Grammarly for business to check for readability and like tone checking, things like that can be great. let’s see chat GPT of course, and the commercially available models are great for AI, you know, interpretation or translation. you just can’t put any protected health information into those models. So, ⁓ be very, very careful with that. And then on a
different end of the spectrum. There’s something like, you know, toggle track, which is a time tracking software. And this is something I’ll use with folks to just get an initial gauge of where your report writing time actually, actually goes. So, you know, this is where you, I’m a big fan of data, of course. So if you’re using a time tracker, you can do a really nice like pre and post intervention study, so to speak, where you maybe add one automation tool and then see how much time it can save you.
compared to before.
Let’s see, what else? let’s talk about kind of bigger picture, just like philosophical stuff. Those of you who listen a lot know that I mentioned, my existential, my ongoing existential dilemmas quite a bit. it’s just kind of a stage of life, I think. But I think in the bigger picture, we have to think about, ⁓ time as our most valuable currency, right? It’s the only non-renewable resource that we have. So,
Every hour that we claw back from report writing is an hour that you could put toward something else. I mean, it could be business, could be marketing, could be, you know, other clinical work. could be resting. It could be family. This is one of the things that I feel like really strongly about that. we truly only have, limited time here. And if we have the data that says that, you know, we’re essentially spending time on
material that people aren’t reading and don’t value, why are we spending that time when there are so many other meaningful ways to spend that time? you know, philosophical, you know, philosophical reflection here, really think about how you’re spending your time and try to answer that question for yourself. You know, if you’re choosing to write a comprehensive quote unquote, thorough reports,
Is that really the best way to spend your time? And again, the research on multitasking and task switching would say that scattered attention and frequent switching reduces productive time, period. So this is kind of a secondary effect, I think, of writing these huge reports is we’ll often get bored and then do something else and lose cognitive efficiency in the whole process. between just cutting report writing time and cutting sections and implementing some of these strategies and
the resulting increase in cognitive efficiency, that’s a pretty big return on investment, I think.
Also want to start to end, suppose on this idea of just reframing competence, essentially. I’ve hinted at this and talked about it a bit during this episode, but I do want to end on this. know, conciseness I think is a clinical skill. It takes expertise to distill complex data in a clear insight and a short, elegant report signals confidence and command of your craft. All right. Long reports to me can signal uncertainty.
and indecision. I guess the challenge here is to choose clarity and commit to readability, know, give the reader what matters most to them and save yourself the time that you don’t need to spend on these things. So, if you have the time and the energy, you know, there’s a little challenge you could give yourself. I would say, you know, take a week, pick something from this episode to implement.
Maybe you want to simplify one section of your report, turn something into bullet points, create a table for your data, anything like that, or just track your time and kind of do a pre and post analysis after you implement a tech tool and see what happens. I would love to hear any results from something like this. You can comment or shoot me a message, send me an email. I’d love to hear how this goes for you.
think that’s about it for now. As always, we could go super deep into any of these areas, but I just want to take another kind of quick look at how to cut our report writing time without losing depth. So start small, focus on clarity, try to build some momentum. And like I mentioned in the beginning, if you really want to go to the next level and get some accountability and do some hands-on support to work through these suggestions,
consider joining us in craft. Okay. You can learn more at the testing psychologist.com slash craft until next time. Thank you so much for listening.
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