Hello everyone, welcome back to The Testing Psychologist. This is Dr. Jeremy Sharp. Glad to be back talking with y’all. I took a two-week break from the podcast here for a big deal in our private practice.
We have spent the last probably 10 days moving offices. We have been working for several months now to find a space that would house all of our clinicians and give us a little bit more room to grow. Prior to this, we were in an office suite. We were spread across two different suites, so it felt disjointed and not good for our staff to be in separate places.
[00:01:00] I’ve been working over the last few months to find a space that would hold all of us, and we did. So we’ve been waiting on the construction to get finished and strategizing for how to move everything and try to be as efficient as possible. That has been happening over the last week or two. So we are here, we are seeing clients, and feels great to have everybody here in the same space and moving forward with a little bit of room to grow.So thanks for bearing with me as I took two weeks off here with the podcast. I’m going to be back here, I think pretty regularly for the next several weeks. As I mentioned before, I have some cool interviews coming up with some reputable folks here in the field. Catherine Lord, if you’re familiar with ADOS, was an author of the ADOS; and Jacobus Donders who wrote a book all about feedback sessions. Those are [00:02:00] all coming up. I think we have some good interviews for you in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, I’m going to do a little podcast series here called Five Quick Tips. I think I’m going to do probably three of these. Today will be the first one. The idea is to hit you with five really simple, easy tweaks to address some different issues with testing.
Today’s episode is on writing reports efficiently and getting your reports done. We’ve had a lot of questions in the Facebook group about how to get reports done efficiently. So today I’ll be talking with you about Five Quick Tips for Getting Reports Done. And then we’ll move on from there. In the coming weeks, I’m going to talk about Five Quick Tips for Billing. I’m also going to talk about Five Quick Tips for Marketing your testing practice over the next couple of weeks.
Before I jump [00:03:00] into the Podcast today, I wanted to talk with you about Practice Solutions. They are responsible for bringing you the podcast today and for the entire month of October.
Spending valuable time and energy focusing on an administrative task like billing can be the biggest limiting factor to your practice’s growth. Between saving you time and making sure your billing is done with integrity and transparency, Practice Solutions is the best choice. We use them here in our practice and they have just been fantastic for us. From eligibility and benefits checks to denial follow-up, they’ll get you paid as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their services are transparent and unlike any in their field. You’ll know the status of your billing 24/7. They take great care of you.
So if you are looking for a billing service, I would certainly consider Practice Solutions. Like I said, they’ve done a great job for our practice. I can [00:04:00] highly recommend them. And you get 20% off your first month when you sign up from the podcast link, which will be in the show notes.
Moving forward with our Five Quick Tips for Getting Your Reports Done, these are just a few things that I found over time that have helped. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail, but I’ll give you a few things to write down and start to explore to try and make some of these little changes in your practice.
Tip 1. Think about getting a dual monitor set up for your computer. The reason I say this is because it can help with paperless files which cuts down on storage, but more specifically to reports, I find the dual monitor setup to be helpful because I can be writing the report on one monitor while I am looking at relevant documents on the [00:05:00] other monitor. So if you get monitors that are big enough, you can have easily two Word document-size windows open at the same time. So you could be looking at two sets of scores. You could be looking at your history and scores. You could be looking at the report you’re writing and any amount of data on the other monitor. This has helped me switch back and forth quickly and get that data into the report as quickly as possible.
Another thing that you might consider is to extend your intake sessions to include time to write your history. For example, you could extend your intake sessions by, let’s say, a half hour. So, you just know that after that intake session, you go right to the computer or to your dictation software, whatever you might be using to write your history, and you [00:06:00] sit down right there and bang out that history as fast as possible.
This has helped me because, rather than going to write the report, maybe a week or two after the testing has been done, I already have the history there. I don’t have to spend time putting that together. And it’s a lot fresher on my mind right after the intake. So my recommendation is to schedule it right into your EHR. If you’re not using an EHR, block it into your paper planner and include it as part of the interview time.
Tip 3, I would look into software like Text Expander or simply use the autocorrect feature on Word to streamline the report writing process and let you put in familiar repetitive chunks of the report as easily [00:07:00] as possible.
Text Expander is a piece of software that lets you use a shortcut to expand into a longer paragraph. For example, I have a paragraph that I include in my reports pretty often that is an explanation of ADHD; what it is, what it typically looks like, and things like that. I have a Text Expander snippet is what they’re called. The snippet is ADHD explanation. Every time I type ADHD explanation, it expands automatically into this longer paragraph that I have put into the program at an earlier time. So it cuts down, if you have paragraphs like that, that you write pretty often, it cuts down on the time to do that. So you’re not typing them over and over.
You can use TextExpander or Word’s auto-correct function. They serve the [00:08:00] same purpose. I think Text Expander is a lot more detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive, but either would work. I have a video on the website, or let’s see, I don’t know if I have it on the website. I think it is linked in the Facebook group, but I will put a link to the video in the show notes on how to use Word auto-correct to expand your text as well. So consider something like that.
Tip 4. Develop recommendation banks and use the text expansion feature or the insert file feature in Word to insert those recommendation banks. When I say recommendation banks, these are templates, I suppose where I’ll have a set of recommendations, say for ADHD for kids, and over time, I add to that [00:09:00] recommendation bank based on all the kids that I might diagnose with ADHD. I will add those recommendations to that particular recommendation file. And then for future kids who also get diagnosed with ADHD, I will insert those recommendations. For me, it’s a lot easier to go through and delete recommendations that don’t fit than to conjure up new recommendations and type them in. So that’s the approach that I take.
Now, again, you can pair this with a Text Expander or an autocorrect. For example, you might have a snippet called ADHD kid recommendations, and then it just expands into that full set. Alternatively, you can use the insert file feature in Word, which is what I do. You insert the file and then it puts the recommendations in automatically. So you don’t have to copy and paste, which can take up a [00:10:00] lot of time.
The last recommendation that I have for getting reports done is to chunk your time. I’ve talked about this in previous podcasts in terms of scheduling and managing your schedule for testing. But I’ll say it again, chunking your time can be a huge asset. When you chunk your time, you set aside huge blocks, I would say at least 3 to 4 hours to write reports. Unless you are a superhero who can write reports and do meaningful work in a half hour or an hour, which I cannot seem to do, chunking your time can be really helpful.
I would take however much time it takes you to write a report from start to finish and have that many chunks in your schedule. It doesn’t have to be every week, but fit them in a time period that makes sense for how fast you want to turn your reports around.
For [00:11:00] me, I know that I can get a report done from start to finish in about 2 hours if it’s fairly straightforward, maybe 3 to 4 hours if it’s extra complex or have to write a lot of new content. So every other week I block out at least two full weekdays to write reports. Those days I just come in, and I do not check email except at the beginning of the day, maybe once in the middle, and then maybe once at the end. All I do is write reports and it helps to get in the flow and get in the zone to get those reports done.
Those were my five quick tips for getting reports done. I hope that was helpful to you. Again, in the next couple of episodes, we’ll be talking about five quick tips for marketing and five quick tips for billing your testing services. So check those out over the next two weeks.
[00:12:00] In the meantime, if you are in the market for a billing service, like I said, Practice Solutions has been fantastic for our practice. They are sponsoring this month’s podcast episodes and they are giving anyone who signs up through the podcast or this link, a 20% discount on the first month’s services. Catherine and Jeremy are fantastic. They’re a husband-wife team. They are super responsive and super knowledgeable, and they will take really good care of you with everything billing-wise. So check them out if you’re thinking about a billing service and take care in the meantime. Thanks. Bye-bye.