Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:35)
All right, folks, we are back. We are back with episode four of the first pillar of this March sprint on clinical precision. So we’ve talked about the neurobiology of fatigue. We talked about the nuances of cognitive disengagement syndrome and the ethical management of validity data. But now we’re going to talk about where all of that data goes. And that is in the report. We really can’t talk about report writing enough.
So I want you to be honest. How many times have you slaved over a report? Maybe it’s 15 pages, maybe it’s 20, maybe it’s 25, maybe it’s more based on some of the conversations I’ve had with consulting clients, only to have the referring provider call you and ask a question that was clearly answered on page 10 or even worse, indicate that they haven’t even read the report at all. Or…
Maybe you’ve had a patient look at your data tables and just come back with a completely glazed over expression. So I think the the score dumping era of assessment is over. So in 2026, you know, our value is not in generating numbers, it is in generating wisdom. That’s where the title of the episode comes from. So today we’re going to talk about how to craft an integrated report that I think moves beyond scores.
and reporting results into a narrative that actually maybe changes people’s lives, which is, I think, what we’re all trying to do here. And as usual, before we transition to the actual episode, I want to make you aware of Crafted Practice, which is my in-person retreat. The Testing Psychologist in-person retreat, it’s happened every year for the past three years. This will be year number four. It’s an all-inclusive,
business retreat where you get to take some time off, do three or four days of just focusing on your business, doing small group work, implementing ideas, actually getting work done on your practice. And then you get to relax and do happy hours and go to dinner with folks and just connect with people who understand your life and your business. So this is an all inclusive deal. Once you pay the registration, you just have to get here. And I think at this point we have, gosh, we’re around.
somewhere in the low teens for spots. There are 20 spots total and we have 12, 13 left. So check it out. I would love to see you there. It’s been awesome the past few years with a really strong, robust community built around it. So you can go to the testingpsychologist.com slash crafted practice to get more info and to register. All right, let’s have this conversation about writing better reports.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (03:40)
All right people, we are back. We’re talking about one of my favorite topics, which is report writing. So as I mentioned in the intro, that old model of just dumping scores into a report, listing a bunch of results, either in the text or in the tables or both is just getting played out, I think, at this point. So terms of the most important real estate in your
That is the first half of page one. OK. So think about that. Just take a moment to reflect on what does the first half of page one of your report look like. And I’m not talking about if you have like a cover sheet. That’s not necessarily what I’m talking about or a graphic or something like that or a header. I’m talking about like the first half you know where there’s information for someone to consume.
So research has shown that for non-specialists, which is the majority of our audience, I think, in most settings, a model that’s much more consumer focused is far superior for retention of the information presented. So most of us, including myself, put the reason for referral on page one and then some other stuff.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (04:55)
Now, many of you have heard of the inverted pyramid model. This is a model that I think has been popularized by Stephanie Nelson and others. So that’s getting really close. What a lot of us do and what a lot of us were trained in though is, you know, we put reason for referral on page one and then the diagnosis and recommendations on page 15 or 20 or something like that or at the end of the report. And
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (05:25)
I want to challenge you to flip that. And this could be an inverted pyramid where you put the most important information at the first, at the beginning. You could do something called like a clinical snapshot block at the very top of the report. OK. So what would this clinical snapshot include? Clinical snapshot would include diagnosis, key findings, and top three recommendations. Right there. Right there on page one.
All right. Why? Why would we do this? So diagnosis is pretty clear. The why is kind of like a two-sentence synthesis of findings, I suppose. So this is a little bit of an explanation. This is the key findings part of the clinical snapshot. Now two sentences, I’m guessing some people are like, my gosh, I could never do two sentences.
This is the challenge. This is the challenge. Consuming information for our audience burns cognitive calories, right? We talked about that in episode one of this series actually, and cognitive fatigue and testing fatigue and that kind of thing. thinking burns calories and that’s why it is imperative that we keep things pretty short, at least to the beginning. Okay, so…
Lots of folks are going to look at that first page and want to take in the most important information. OK. So clinical snapshot. It’s going to have the diagnosis, which is pretty straightforward. The why or the key findings summarized in a couple of sentences. OK. Definitely no more than a paragraph. And then the the now what or the recommendations. OK.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (06:57)
So I would keep this to at most the three most critical recommendations that someone should do right now. right. So research would say that people are implementing very few of our recommendations. I think it’s like two and a half recommendations. So you know it’s hard to scale down that low but we’re to round up to three. So I’ll give you three critical recommendations that you put as a clinical snapshot on that first page. So by putting all of these answers quote unquote at the beginning you lower that cognitive load for the reader.
and make sure that the information is actually processed, which is I think what most of us are going for. We want our reports to be read and digested.
All right. So let’s talk about narrative synthesis a little bit. And this is something that you might call like the so what rule.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (09:08)
So when we report scores. So something like memory was average attention was low things like that. We’re asking the reader to do the synthesis for us. That is our job. All right. Like it’s just like you know there are many skills that we do not possess as psychologists. You know I think about my consulting that talk about.
We don’t possess financial management skills or marketing skills or any number of other skills. And so we’re going to carry that parallel over to our reports where our consumers, know, most of us, our audience, does not have the skill of integrating clinical data. So by presenting them with all this data and results, we’re sort of like asking them to know how to synthesize that information and know what to do with it.
And when people read our results, they are confused and overwhelmed because of course they have no idea how to integrate that information or synthesize it. But it by us presenting it, it’s like they’re expected to know how to do so. So you might use something that you could call the so what rule. Every time you write a data driven sentence, has to follow with like a functional so what, you know?
So for example, you don’t just say like processing speed fell in the extremely low range. All right. Instead, you could say something like while first names intellectual potential is high, the slow processing speed acts like bottleneck in high stakes, in high stakes situation or in the classroom. This person will likely understand the content, but struggle to come up with a response before the conversation has moved on.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (11:00)
All right. So it’s not just presenting the data in isolation. It’s again answering that so what question. It’s like, so what does this mean or so why is this important?
This is kind of what we might call narrative synthesis. So it’s linking the data to the patient or client’s lived experience. right. So AACN guidelines anyway emphasize that we have to explain the interaction between domains. And so, you know,
If memory is low, is that because of a true hippocampal storage problem or is it because some kind of attention issue prevented them from, you know, encoding the information in the first place? And your report is really the only place where that distinction is made clear. So it’s not like I’m, you know, I don’t think that many of us are just like truly reporting data in isolation, but just in case you’re relying on that results section where you do just kind of present a rote
list of results and scores. If you’re relying on that as kind of the bulk of the report and certainly as the first several pages of the report, just know that that isn’t necessarily helpful to our clients. And in fact, does a couple of things. It puts kind of an unwanted cognitive burden on them and it likely serves to trigger some of their own internal shame or critical voice because…
you by us presenting that data, like I said, it almost creates this expectation that they should know what to do with it. We’re telling them it’s important by putting it front and center in the report and they have to determine whether it actually is or not. Okay. That’s a lot. So I’ll pause just for a second. Based on experience, this is where a lot of feelings tend to come up and people are saying, I can’t get rid of that or that’s super important or what am I going to do?
So I’ll leave you with that for a second and just say, you know, trust me that it can be okay.
If you really want to include results like you know a written version of the results in your report, a rote written version without a true synthesis, just put it as an appendix. Okay. Just don’t put it front and center. That’s that’s a step in the right direction.
So let’s talk about recommendations a little bit. think recommendation fatigue is real. right. If you give a client 20 plus 30 plus recommendations they will likely do zero of them simply because they are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. So maybe think about doing like a tiered recommendations approach. All right. So tier one is sort of like immediate recommendations slash safety recommendations. All right.
This might be, I don’t know, a sleep study or a medication consult or pursuing academic accommodations at school, something like that. Tier 2 can then move to something like maybe environmental or compensatory recommendations, okay? So like using a digital task manager or changing the layout of their room or the office or movement breaks like we talked about in episode 1.
And then tier three is more like developmental or therapeutic recommendations, like psychotherapy or executive functioning, coaching, things like that. So another way to do this is to break them up into sections based on locale. So a lot of people do school recommendations or work recommendations or medical recommendations, things like
So by tiering them or breaking them up and giving some sense of what is most important, it just gives the client more of a roadmap. You’re telling them, do these three things first, and then the rest can wait until next month or three months down the road, whatever you determine it to be. And I think this is one place where we can be very prescriptive in our recommendations, especially in terms of
the order that the recommendations can go in and how to prioritize the recommendations. So this is one place that I’m really thinking about. know, we do a main recommendation section where we highlight the most critical recommendations. But then at least at this point, we are putting the quote unquote full recommendations in an appendix and just referencing it and saying to folks like, go check these out when you’re ready.
But I think there’s even more room to structure the recommendations and provide more of a roadmap into this maybe three tier system, you know, to give people a sense of do this first. Once that’s in place, move to this. And then once you get really comfortable and have some time and energy, you can move to these recommendations.
Now we could talk forever about reports. I mean, I’ve done hours long presentations on report writing as have others. know, Stephanie Nelson’s done a lot of writing and speaking on this. Liz Angoff does a lot of writing and speaking on this. There are plenty of people out there who who tackle this topic, but I don’t think we can talk about report writing enough to be honest because it is our product. You know, this is the only part of our work that really truly outlasts the testing and the feedback session.
You know, it sits in the medical record. It goes to the doctor’s office. It can be used by school staff to determine kids’ futures, you know. So by moving away from a score-centric narrative and more toward an integrative narrative, I think that you’re making sure that your expertise isn’t just recorded, it is utilized, which is, think, what most of us are really going for, right? Like, we want to have an impact when we want
difference. And a core component of that is making sure that our audience can, well, read and understand and implement the information in our reports. So this wraps up the first pillar of our March sprint. Next week, we’re going to pivot to pillar two, which is the business lab section. We’re going to talk about lots of business aspects related to practice. We’re going to start with, you know,
episode five in the sprint, is reverse engineering your hourly rate. Love talking about this stuff. We’re going to move past, you know, market averages, so to speak, and get you to really, you know, find the number that actually supports your life and your practice goals. So again, if you have not liked or subscribed or followed the podcast, now’s a great time to do it just because there’s going to be a ton of content coming out over the next couple of weeks. So thanks for being here.
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