What Makes AI Scribes Different in Behavioral Health?
By Brett Talbot
AI scribes are rapidly becoming commonplace in healthcare. But if you’re in behavioral health, you’ve probably noticed something: most AI documentation tools weren’t built with your needs in mind.
The Problem with Generic AI Scribes
Most AI scribes were designed for primary care or specialty medicine -encounters that follow predictable patterns with specific diagnostic criteria and treatment protocols. Document the chief complaint, record the physical exam, order the labs, prescribe the medication.
Behavioral health is fundamentally different:
- Sessions are longer - 45-60 minutes versus 15-minute encounters
- Conversations are less structured - Therapeutic dialogue doesn’t follow a checklist
- Nuance matters more - Tone, affect, and subtle language patterns carry clinical significance
- Relationship is treatment - The therapeutic alliance itself is a clinical intervention
- Privacy sensitivities are heightened - Patients share their most vulnerable experiences
Generic AI scribes struggle with these realities. They may capture words but miss meaning. They can transcribe a session but fail to produce documentation that reflects clinical judgment.
What Behavioral Health Needs
Understanding Therapeutic Modalities
A behavioral health AI scribe needs to understand different therapeutic approaches -CBT, DBT, motivational interviewing, psychodynamic therapy -and document appropriately for each. The same patient statement might be documented differently depending on the treatment framework.
Appropriate Clinical Language
Behavioral health documentation requires specific clinical terminology and frameworks. Progress notes should reflect treatment planning language, capture relevant mental status elements, and support medical necessity for continued care.
Recognizing What Matters
Not everything said in a therapy session belongs in the clinical record. A skilled behavioral health AI scribe should identify clinically relevant content while appropriately filtering conversational elements that don’t require documentation.
Supporting Multiple Note Formats
Behavioral health uses specific documentation formats -GIRP notes, DAP notes, progress notes, medical necessity documentation -each with different structural requirements. Your AI scribe should support the formats your organization actually uses.
The Group Therapy Challenge
Here’s where generic AI scribes really fail: group therapy documentation.
After leading a 90-minute group with 8-12 patients, clinicians face documenting individual progress notes for each participant. General-purpose AI can’t distinguish between speakers, attribute comments correctly, or generate individualized documentation.
This is why we developed Group Notes with Speaker Map technology -automatically identifying individual patient voices and generating separate documentation for each group participant. It’s a capability that simply doesn’t exist in generic AI scribes.
HIPAA and Behavioral Health Privacy
Behavioral health documentation carries heightened privacy concerns. Patients disclose substance use, trauma histories, relationship difficulties, and other sensitive information that requires special protection.
Your AI scribe needs robust HIPAA compliance, clear data handling policies, and the option to delete recordings after documentation is complete. At Videra Health, we never use patient data to train our models -your patients’ sessions stay private.
The Sidekick Difference
Sidekick Notes was built from the ground up for behavioral health. We understand the clinical workflows, documentation requirements, and privacy concerns unique to mental health and substance use treatment.
The result? Clinicians reclaim 60-70% of their documentation time while producing higher-quality notes that better reflect their clinical work.
Ready to see the difference purpose-built AI makes? Contact us for a demo of Sidekick Notes.