Trainings
Strengthen your documentation skills. Reduce anxiety. Protect your practice.
Misery or Mastery®
Essential Documentation for Psychotherapists
…empowering mental health professionals to translate their clinical intuition into effective documentation
Whether or not you take insurance, documentation is a required professional standard of care. With the rise in oversight from insurance companies, workman’s comp claims, child protection agencies, the courts, and your professional organization, knowing how to document to meet regulatory standards is more important than ever.
If you ever
• lose sleep worrying about an audit or legal involvement
• spend too much time writing notes, procrastinate, or avoid them
• feel unsure about regulatory standards
• worry about preserving client confidentiality
• think writing notes is a clinically irrelevant waste of time
You are not alone. Many clinicians report that there is little guidance about what to write while also finding there is little time to write it. Documentation can feel disconnected from being helpful to clients, creating confusion and unnecessary anxiety.
The Misery or Mastery®: Essential Documentation for Psychotherapists training teaches a step-by-step approach to guide you through treatment plans, progress notes, case and collateral notes, diagnostic summaries, and discharge summaries. This process helps take the struggle out of paperwork so you can put your focus where you really want it — on your clients.
You may never learn to love writing notes, but if you choose mastery over misery, your documentation will not only be meaningful, it will reflect the high quality of your clinical work and protect your income at the same time.
You Will Learn to:
Apply the clinical documentation process for writing successful notes, treatment plans, case consults, discharge and intake summaries -to Medicare standards.
Demonstrate how to translate your work into the behavioral language required by insurance companies while organizing your clinical thinking through structured documentation
Document medical necessity using the Golden Thread
Identify Red Flags that could trigger an audit and result in insurance recoupment
Instructor
Beth Rontal, MSW, LICSW, is a nationally recognized and engaging speaker on mental health documentation for private practice clinicians and those in agency settings. She mastered her teaching skills with thousands of hours supervising and training clinicians at an agency for 11 years. Her Misery & Mastery ™ trainings and documentation forms have been used world-wide. Beth works with both emerging and seasoned mental health professionals, agencies, clinics, group practices, and hospitals. Beth writes biogs on clinical documentation, cochairs the NASW Private Practice Shared Interest Group, and has a private practice in Brookline, MA specializing in working with people who struggle with emotional eating.
Why Documentation Training Matters
Good documentation supports good clinical practice, facilitates authorizations, and helps mental health professionals and clinics pass insurance audits. It contributes to a marked reduction in work-related anxiety and increased job satisfaction.
With increased oversight from insurance companies, the department of social services, workman’s compensation, and the courts, clear and effective record keeping has become essential. Because the courts can mandate access to records, understanding confidentiality and privacy in relationship to documentation requirements is critical.
When clinicians use the Golden Thread to connect all aspects of treatment, their documentation becomes clearer, more efficient, and more clinically useful. This structure supports both the clinician’s reasoning and the client’s progress.
Begin Your Documentation Training
Start with our Essential Documentation Training for a comprehensive, step-by-step system for writing clear, effective notes. Continuing Education credits are available if you wish to add them. You can also explore our shorter trainings to deepen your skills in specific areas.
To review the course agenda or CE details, click the icon.
