Dr. Jeremy Sharp (01:20)
Hey folks, here we are again, Testing Psychologist Podcast. We are talking about AI and automation today. This is one of the tools that I’ve been working on most heavily, I think, over the past few months.
This is the idea of utilizing gems and projects to step in and fill certain roles in your practice. Now, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, that is totally okay.
I’m going to talk about it in the episode. I’m going to give you the rundown on what a gem or a project is, how to set one up, the key ways that you can use them in your practice, and help you troubleshoot just a little bit in this whole process. So the idea is that by the end of the episode, you should have a good idea of how to set up a gem or a project to help you do any number of things in your practice.
And for those of you who are AI skittish or Hesitant, that’s totally okay. we’re not gonna be talking about clinical work of AI today, at least not for the most part. so if you’re saying to yourself, I never want to use AI to write reports, that’s totally okay. We’re not gonna talk about AI to write reports. We’re gonna talk about how to use it in other contexts in your practice. before I get to the episode, a couple things. a couple cool things coming up.
One, there is an assessment summit in October. It’s called the Bridges of the Mind Assessment Summit. And I’m going to be doing the keynote there, talking about 10 trends in private practice and assessment, talking about what these trends are and how to work with them, how to approach them, how to deal with them in your practice and in your work. That’s going to let’s see, October 8th, 9th, and 10th in Sacramento, California.
So you can get more information at bridges of the mind.com/slash events and register there if you would like to. So that’s one thing that’s coming up.
The other thing I wanted to mention is if you have been listening to the podcast here for a while and you are not yet a follower, please go to Apple or Spotify or wherever you’re listening to your podcast and hit that
subscribe button and Apple Podcasts or the follow button and Spotify and that’ll just make sure that you get episodes every week when they’re downloaded. And if you’re feeling extra generous and Benevolent, you can even rate or review the podcast in Apple or Spotify. All these things just help the podcast spread to more folks who might want to listen to it.
So I really appreciate that. All right, let’s jump to this conversation about using gems and projects to help automate roles in your practice.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (04:16)
Okay, everybody, we are back jumping into this episode here. if you’re listening to this, I would say there’s a high probability that somewhere on your desk or you know in your computer, in a tab, even behind this window that you’re listening in, there’s a long report that is currently eating your soul, along with any number of other tasks that you are having a hard time accomplishing or getting done. Things that have sat in your inbox for months or weeks.
Decisions that you’re trying to make, issues that you’re trying to work through and maybe you feel stuck on. So as psychologists, I think we, you know, sign up for the clinical puzzle, which is like figuring out complex diagnostic pictures and diving into the the numbers and the metrics and helping clients or parents understand how the brains work. we did not sign up for the endless administrative slog that surrounds it. So that’s like the repetitive emails, the hours that we spend editing the reports.
The cognitive fatigue of double checking whether recommendations actually line up with clinical presentations, sorting through the myriad issues that come up in running a practice from a compliance standpoint or a financial standpoint or even just a business guidance standpoint.
So many of you have started experimenting with AI to help with some of these tasks, but if you’re like most clinicians that I talk to in my coaching, and my membership, your process looks like this. maybe you open a blank chat window, you type out maybe it could be like a very brief prompt, could be a massive prompt. Either way, you get a decent response, and then you close the tab. And then the next week you do it all again, you start from scratch, you maybe are like hunting back in your past prompts, copying and pasting.
So that’s essentially like I think hiring a brilliant executive assistant andor admin assistant or office manager and wiping their memory clean somehow at the end of every workday. Okay, so you’re kind of starting from zero every time. So today, what we’re trying to do is move away from single-use prompts and talk about custom gems and projects within your AI software. We’re going to cover how to build them, how to build permanent.
Custom trained digital assistants inside your workspace that already know your practice style and your compliance rules and your report standards before you even type a single word. So I’ll say here at the beginning: if this is something that’s interesting to you and you like this content, this is just part of a smaller, or sorry, this is a small part of a bigger training that I’ve been doing in my membership over the last six or eight weeks, where we’re like diving deep into uses of AI like this and working together and actually creating these things together. So as you listen, if you think that’s interesting and you like it, and you want to go deeper, you can go and check out the membership community, which is called Craft.
You can find that on my website. All right, so let’s start with a little background. So what is a custom gem? What is a project? I want to demystify what we’re actually talking about here. Depending on which platform you use, so Google calls them gems.
ChatGPT calls them custom GPTs and Claude calls them projects. So beneath all these marketing names, they’re all basically the same thing. So it’s a dedicated, like kind of mini app that stores permanent system instructions and context documents and behavioral rules that you can use over and over. So when you use standard AI, you know, it behaves kind of like a temporary intern in your practice, right? Every time you open a new thread, you have to explain.
I’m a clinical psychologist. I do neuropsych testing. Please don’t use fluffy corporate language. Do not include patient data, et cetera. You have to type out all those instructions and details over and over. A custom gem or project or chat GPT or GPT on the other hand is more like an employee who reads your practice handbook and memorized your tone, sign an agreement on your rules, and they just sit at the desk waiting for your command.
And if you want it to do so, they can even do these things in your voice. So when you open a customized gem or project, the foundation is essentially already built. you don’t prompt it from square one. You’re simply giving it the raw material for the day, and it executes immediately according to those predefined standards and instructions. Okay, so for an assessment practice where the things we have to do, they’re highly structured, they’re technical, time-sensitive.
I think this shifts AI from an occasional novelty to like a core piece of your practice infrastructure. And I think this works for solo practitioners all the way up to group practitioners.
All right, so what can you use to actually build these gems or projects? if you want a gem or project that actually gives you high grade administrative output, step one, you cannot just give it vague instructions like be a helpful assistant. you need to build it using a specific four-part structure. Okay, so first part is a persona.
This is where you have to explicitly state what the gem is embodying. So don’t just say an assistant. You know, you would say something a little more detailed like you’re an expert clinical copywriter and administrative strategist working for a specialized pediatric assessment practice. You see what I mean? You gotta be pretty detailed here. The second part is giving it context and a custom background. So this is where you give it the ground rules of your practice model. What types of evals do you conduct?
Are you private pay? What age groups do you serve? What’s your mission? Things like that. giving it this baseline context prevents it from giving you generic advice that might be meant for like a direct pay therapy practice or a hospital system or something like that. the third component of the setup is negative constraints. So AI tends to default to overpromising and inflated adjectives and sounding like a late-night infomercial at times.
So in assessment and the work that we do, I think precision and language is everything. So the negative constraints are the strict boundaries. Okay. So you might tell it never use words like transformative or delve or game changer. Or never use m-dashes, right? Or never offer clinical diagnoses or generate synthetic patient histories, things like that. for me, I had to tell it to never use emojis, right? Like
I never put emojis in my copy. So these are just a few things, a few constraints that you can give it. The fourth part is the output formatting. So this is where you tell it exactly how you want the finished product to be delivered. So should it be a bulleted list or a two-column table or 150-word email? So the more precise you can be, the better you get at eliminating, I don’t know, 90 to 95% of the editing work on the back end. All right.
So we have a sense of what gems and projects are and four-part structure to actually set them up. Now we’re gonna talk about three custom gems I think every psychologist should build within your practice. Okay, we’re gonna make this very concrete. The first one is what I will call like a report reviewer. Okay, so this is the only one that’s gonna dip into PHI explicitly. Okay, and I’m not talking about writing.
Reports with AI. Like I said at the beginning, I’m not going to try to convince you to write reports with AI. Okay, we’ve tackled that in many other episodes. But we can use a custom gem or project to audit the reports and analyze for you know logical flow, coherence, things like that. So you build a gem that’s essentially a report reviewer. Okay, you instruct it to take a report and
Look through all of the factors, you know, the background, the history, the scores, diagnostic impressions, recommendations, and just review it for internal consistency and grammatical errors and anything that doesn’t hang together. All right. So you can ask it explicit questions if you want to, like, does this recommendation make sense for the data? or you can just say, hey, review this report.
Looking at the following editing ideas.
Or you can have it review the entire report based on a set of criteria that you give it, you know, in terms of grammar, punctuation, organization. You can give it specific things to look for. So it acts as kind of like a tireless supervisor, if you want to think of it that way. I’ve been using a gem like this to review my own reports for quite a while, and it produces some pretty meaningful insights.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (15:13)
All right, another gem that I think you can use is a practice advisory board. So what does this mean? we all are running businesses, right? And we face any number of choices in that business. Like how do we structure our fees? do we go flat rate versus hourly? How do we do intake deposits or do we do intake deposits? How should we schedule? What does our framework look like? How do we communicate about our wait list? You know, different things like that. So
you can create a business advisory board with three different perspectives, right? You could have, let’s say, a conservative financial advisor, you could have an operations and an efficiency persona, and you can have a client experience advocate. These are just three examples. You can create this gem to be whatever you want. But the idea is that you have a business advisory board. and whenever you’re considering like a practice policy change, like increasing fees or changing your.
Cancellation policy or something like that, you pitch it to the gym or project and it’ll instantly spit out a critique from all three perspectives, showing you, you know, the different risks, the advantages, and depending how you instruct it, it can give you insight and challenge you and any number of other things. So that’s the business advisory board. The last gym that you might want to use is one that I will call like a clinical compliance officer, for example.
So this is the gym where you can run by any compliance decisions, any ethical concerns. so this is kind of a first pass before you might consult with an attorney. Now, of course, you have to be careful here, okay? I’m not advocating that this replace an attorney or a consultation with a risk management person, but it can be a great first pass. So in this case, you would instruct it to you know, be extremely well educated on your state laws.
APA guidelines, ethical code, et cetera, and instruct it to review any of your dilemmas through that lens and provide critical feedback and points for you to think about in solving those dilemmas. So lots of different ideas for gems that you could have, but these are three, I think, that you could start with. And if that feels overwhelming, you can pick one and you know start to mess around with that.
As we start to wrap up here, you know, before you go off and start building all these things, I think we have to talk about boundaries and compliance and security. Now, I’ve talked about this in other podcasts, but it always bears repeating. Rule number one is that we put zero PHI in consumer AI models. So unless you’re operating on an enterprise agreement with a signed business associate agreement.
Through, say, Google Workspace or Office 365 or ChatGPT for clinicians or Claude for healthcare. unless you know for a fact you’ve signed a BAA and it’s designed specifically for HIPAA compliant data entry, you cannot put PHI into any commercially available LLM. So that just means, you know, don’t use the publicly available ChatGPT or Claude or whatever.
When you’re building your gems, you know, you want to build them for operational templates and business communication and that kind of thing. You definitely wanna check your account privacy settings as well, whether you’re using Google Workspace or OpenAI. Just make sure your conversation history retention is configured according to you know your practice security policies and ensure that the data training.
Toggles are turned off. This should be turned off by default with any of those HIPAA compliant versions, but you want to make sure. All right.
Okay, so I hope this is helpful for you. as I said at the beginning, you don’t have to dip into using AI to write reports by any means. this is purposeful in giving you a few other options that can still take advantage of AI without jumping into actually writing reports. So this, you know, this whole process to build a custom gem or project probably takes like 10 good minutes.
But I think if you do it correctly, it can save you hours every week for long, long time. So my challenge for y’all is, you know, not to try to automate your entire practice by tomorrow morning, but just pick one repetitive task, whether it’s like drafting email responses or reviewing reports, creating, you know, parent friendly recommendation handouts, and just like experiment, build your first gem or project and see how it does. All right.
And as I mentioned toward the beginning, if you like this level of kind of practical hands-on implementation and even taking this further and doing this with a group of folks who are also in it with you, this exact step-by-step building process is precisely what we are doing inside the membership community craft. It’s community built exclusively for testing psychologists. And we talk a lot about, you know, mastering business systems, ethical AI, of course. We talk about financial management, our practices.
Practice efficiency, things like that. and the cool thing about it is that we have you know an hour of QA followed by an hour of co-working where we’re actually, you know, doing work together. We do that twice a month, every month. So the enrollment is limited. I open the enrollment twice a year in January and July. So the next cohort open opens in January 2027. But you can head over to the website now to
Join the wait list so that you get first dibs whenever enrollment opens. until next time, happy building. I hope that you get to craft a gem or a project and actually see how it can be helpful for you. And as always, if you have any experience with this, if you have questions, thoughts, reach out. You can reach me at Jeremy at testingpsychologist.com. I love to read your thoughts and experiences as you’re building your practices.
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