AI, Automation Examples & Etsy Empires — AI Tech That Gets You Off the Chair (and Back Your Time)
If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, “There’s got to be a smarter way to run this practice,” this episode is for you. Dr. Colleen Long takes you behind the scenes of AI automation examples and tools that are helping the modern therapist finally reclaim time without sacrificing quality, connection, or creativity.
From real-world AI for clinicians to easy-to-apply systems that bring freedom back to your week, Colleen breaks down how AI tech is reshaping what’s possible in private practice. This is your no-fluff guide to building structure, scaling smarter, and learning how to reclaim time while letting technology do the heavy lifting.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
The AI automation examples that make running your practice simpler and more sustainable
How AI for clinicians is changing documentation, admin tasks, and communication
Which AI tech tools Dr. Colleen actually uses to reclaim time every week
Why the modern therapist needs systems that match their values and workflow
How embracing AI automation examples helps you grow with purpose, not pressure
If you’re ready to work less, earn more, and think bigger, this conversation will show you how to apply AI for clinicians, choose practical AI tech, and join a community of modern therapists redefining success through systems that reclaim time and energy.
👉 Join the conversation inside the Founders Circle, our 2026 mastermind for clinician-entrepreneurs ready to grow sustainably
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[00:00:10] Colleen: Okay, this is episode 13, AI Automation and Etsy Empires Tech that gets you off the train and back your time. Clinicians are using AI and automation to work smarter, not harder. From Etsy Empires to AI note-taking. This is your No Fluff Guide to the tools and Tech traps shaping the future of freedom. So as promised, guys, this might just be one of my favorite episodes to film of the year of my life, maybe, and hopefully some of yours too.
[00:00:41] Colleen: So if you are a technology AI nerd and love to nerd out on all of this stuff today, we are chucking this episode full of all of these tangible tools out there for you to automate, probably some of the stuff that you're doing manually that you don't need to do anymore. It will probably also help save you some money in terms of automation and not necessarily having to pay for this thing to be done manually anymore.
[00:01:11] Colleen: So today we're diving into those tools that are getting clinicians off the train and back their time. It is packed. It's practical, and it's the exact conversation I wish I'd heard when I was buried in 30 sessions a week, wondering if freedom was just for Tech Bros.
[00:01:26] Colleen: So grab your coffee, open your notes app, and let's get into it.
[00:01:30] Colleen: Okay? So you know, I love my panel co-hosts, Dr. Jen and Erica. It is a holiday today, and I am flying solo. So I thought I would give you my full download of everything that has been blowing my mind in AI and technology, and automation this year. And if you ever wish you could run your practice with half the stress and twice the strategy, this is your sign.
[00:01:57] Colleen: So before we dive in, let me set the stage. This is not gonna be your mom's podcast about what ChatGPT is. So if you're there, this is probably not gonna be the podcast for you. If you are looking for the ethical implications of using AI in healthcare, you will find thousands of them out there. But this is not what we are talking about today, and we are not just talking about your typical note takers.
[00:02:26] Colleen: Scribe. You know, like use this note taker and it'll give you your time back. We'll talk a little bit about that, but we are going deeper, deeper into technology and AI that is meant to help you truly break free. So let's dive in.
[00:02:47] Colleen: When I was thinking about who our avatar was, as they call it, or who our person is, that would be like, yes, and hear this episode and be really excited. I was thinking about it in generational terms, and I think I'm technically a Gen X or I was born in 1980, but a young Gen Xer, and we sort of have this interesting.
[00:03:11] Colleen: Upbringing, because we grew up in an analog world, but we're now in a digital adulthood. And I remember in 1991, I remember the year the internet came out and that AOL dial-up, and looking at my screen and thinking, what is this? And just this feeling of excitement of all the possibilities. I think that if you're that person, that when you learn about these new things, instead of going to fear and first thinking about all the reasons why you shouldn't do that, you think about all of the things you can do as a result of it.
[00:03:52] Colleen: Hopefully this will be for you. I also think about the younger generations, maybe born in the nineties and two thousands. You've got a real advantage because of the technology that you were sort of born in and used to. And so some of this stuff may not feel as complicated or may not be as much of a lift, but it might also come at a time where you're maybe just starting off your practice and don't necessarily have that incentive to want to get your time back yet.
[00:04:22] Colleen: Like, I've trained all this time and now I'm ready to hang up my shingle. And that could be where. There's some sort of lack of why would I want to get my time back? This is exactly what I've trained for. And then I think about the older generation, right? So people that were born in the fifties and the sixties, and I think about the tech lift. Like a lot of times when New Tech is introduced, and I know certAInly my experience has been with older employees, when you're introducing tech, that can be a source of fear. If you are still using paper notes and don't trust the internet. Are afraid of getting in trouble.
[00:05:03] Colleen: This is probably not gonna be the podcast for you because you can think of a million reasons not to use these things. I think that I've also known and worked with quite a few clinicians who were born in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, and they've adapted quite well, and they are seasoned.
[00:05:25] Colleen: Clinicians that get more than ever why it's important to not trade your time for money. So hopefully this will also appeal to some of you as well.
[00:05:35] Colleen: Okay. Let's get into this very special episode today. So.
[00:05:39] Colleen: I'm flying solo today, and this is gonna be chock-full of tools. We're gonna go at a pretty fast pace and cadence, but you'll get all of this in the show notes, and I just wanna give you all these tech goodies that I'm learning about. I want there to be just like so much. Takeaway, and when you are listening to i,t and you're getting off of the podcast, you're thinking.
[00:06:05] Colleen: Oh my gosh. There's all of this stuff, this world of possibility. That's what my hope would be at the end of today. So if I get a lot of messages and if we can see the engagement on these, then I will do more of these at a later time. And it could also be like clinicians just don't care, which is totally fine too.
[00:06:28] Colleen: So here we go. So, a little backstory, my dad's an electrical engineer. My mom's a computer programmer, so my love for all things tech probably came pretty naturally. A lot of clinicians are either afraid to adopt these tools or they're so buried in their week-to-week that they just don't even feel like they have the time to figure it out.
[00:06:47] Colleen: Like, where would you start? And then even when you start, sometimes the tool becomes obsolete, right? But if you take the time to learn what's out there, it's a total advantage. And tech can be a path to freedom for many. It's not just another thing to manage. So, as a mom of three kids, 11, 11, and 10, I started to get this.
[00:07:12] Colleen: I started to get this. A picture of the world that I probably never would've saw had I not had kids. And if you guys are parents of that age, you can probably identify if you're ever watching what they watch, it's usually a Mr. Beast or a Dude Perfect. Or Mark Rober or Jesser. I watched these guys and I'm like.
[00:07:35] Colleen: What are we doing as a generation? We are trading our time for money, especially when you get a check from one of these insurers for $63, and you fought hard for that check. You had to get a prior authorization, and you had to send a paper claim form because it was a corrected claim. Then I watch these guys that are all sitting around playing with their best friends, shooting a basketball from 30 feet in the AIr, like, oh, and they get a million views, sponsorships, and they're basically getting Gmail to do what they love.
[00:08:11] Colleen: It's hard not to get a little resentful, and so. I cut, well, cut to the other day. I am literally looking for an envelope, a stamp to print out a HIFA form, because a certain insurer only takes a paper form when it needs to be corrected. And that kind of stuff drives me absolutely insane. I'm not suggesting that everybody should become YouTube stars, nor am I suggesting that you should just give up your practices altogether.
[00:08:47] Colleen: But what I am saying is that there are so many tools out there that allow us to leverage our expertise in a way that we were never able to do before. And in a way that could be really fun and freeing, and not in a way that you're just impacting one person hour by hour and capped by the number of hours you can work in a day.
[00:09:13] Colleen: So that's really the motivation behind this is stupid Jesser and dude. Perfect. Alright, so let's get into it. We are hands down the most overworked helping profession. I mean that there's no argument there. We are treated like the redheaded stepchild of healthcare. We carry some of the heaviest administrative burdens wrapped in some of the strictest regulations, all while working with the most emotionally volatile people out there.
[00:09:44] Colleen: So because we're in mental health, we're expected to hold space for everyone. Even when we can't stand up for ourselves, we can stay quiet and afraid. Speaking the truth will be called a HIPAA violation. While our clients can take the social media roast us publicly because they didn't like their diagnosis, and as a testing psychologist, trust me, we get it the worst.
[00:10:05] Colleen: It's one thing to help someone over time and build that therapy relationship with them, but when you have a. Acute interaction with a patient where you're just performing a service, whether it be a custody evaluation or psychological testing, there's much less skin in the game in terms of keeping that relationship.
[00:10:23] Colleen: Psychologists can take it pretty, pretty hard from the patients out there. And then it's also difficult to respond. Clinicians lose an average of eight to 10 hours a week to admin work that software can handle these days. I wanna talk a little bit about. The sort of process that I think a lot of frustrated clinicians, physicians, chiropractors, physical therapists, dentists, you know, this is not just therapy clinicians, but clinicians of all professions are struggling with, which is the level of administrative burden purposefully put on the private practice clinician.
[00:11:08] Colleen: Handicap them so that they can't compete with the other providers out there who are also the payers. So in this new system, you find yourself providing two to three hours for each billable clinical hour you are getting Gmail for. And the math doesn't. Math, as we all know, it's not sustainable. And that's why, unfortunately, so many clinicians are closing down their practices.
[00:11:34] Colleen: So. What do we do about it? Well, outside of. Becoming an Uber driver or a YouTube star, I think we have to look at automation. We have to fight fire with fire, and when the insurance companies are using AI to deny every third claim, maybe we use AI to adjudicate every third claim. There are ways to do that in a HIPAA-compliant way.
[00:11:58] Colleen: And again, I'll let you find all of those episodes about HIPAA compliance. But today I'm gonna talk a little bit about what tools are out there at our fingertips and ready now.
[00:12:08] Colleen: So my number one most favorite platform right now that is blowing my mind is Admirra. And I am not in any way compensated by Admirra. This is not a sponsor of the program. At one time I was beta testing for them, but I have since filled that practice and. I'm using it in another practice. So, Admirra is essentially, if you've used Asana or Trello or any of those other project management tools, it's that, but HIPAA compliant.
[00:12:42] Colleen: You can get Asana to be HIPAA compliant, but you are having to pay for an enterprise level of Asana, which is oftentimes not affordable for clinicians. So Admirra makes it affordable. It's made by a mental health clinician, and it is amazing, especially for someone in my field who does the testing who needs to see a patient at every single.
[00:13:02] Colleen: Stage of the process from intake to prior auth to testing to feedback. So it moves them throughout that. But then you can also use it as a CRM, so you can match it with your therapist. You can verify benefits, you can use it as a texting or train service. You can automate triggers. Now, this has been really helpful for us because we get a lot of calls every day. When's my report gonna be ready?
[00:13:27] Colleen: Has my prior au come in? Do I have a balance? That sort of thing. And in Admirra you can create triggers so that each time you move a patient through in the column, the next column, it triggers an alert to that patient letting them know you've been moved to this column, or you have no outstanding balance, or your report has been sent, or, any number of things that you can think of so you can customize it to work.
[00:13:54] Colleen: I love it. And. It does integrate with some EHRs, so we use Simple practice that integrates with Simple Practice, and I think a couple of others there. So it is just phenomenal. I will say. The SMS system took about three to six months to get working. So that was not fun. And for a while I felt like, I don't know that we're gonna be able to use this, but it has, it did finally work, and you are able to integrate those forms in your website.
[00:14:22] Colleen: So even better, when a patient fills out a form, it automatically pre-populates in your pipeline. So as you can see, it will start to. Take away some of the manual , automated labor that we've been paying for, for so long, for a practice manager to take that phone call, put the patient in the queue, and move them along manually, and having to oversee each individual one.
[00:14:47] Colleen: I love Admirra for so many reasons, and it's phenomenal. Uh, A-D-M-I-R-R-A. Quick pause. If you are listening right now and thinking, okay, I need more of this in my life. Here's what to do next. Join our Facebook group@facebook.com. Slash off the train or follow us on Instagram at Off the train podcast.
[00:15:11] Colleen: Now, I like Facebook groups, maybe because I'm old, but I enjoy having a solid place that's a native platform that you go to every day and you can get updates from us. If you are regularly on YouTube, hit that subscribe bell and you will get reminders and notifications every time we have a new show I know you hear a lot of people say, don't forget to subscribe and share, and it's just falls on deaf ears because everybody's asking for that. But it doesn't just help us grow. When you subscribe, it helps you grow. And here's the reason why. By hitting that bell, by subscribing, if you like what it is that we're talking about, and there's a calling for you to do this, you have this pAIn point.
[00:15:56] Colleen: If you're listening to us and you're listening to us regularly. This plants that seed every week where you get those little freedom reminders. You're already filtering out the noise and you're only bringing in exactly what works. And so these regular micro reminders will keep you from slipping back into that burnout hamster wheel.
[00:16:18] Colleen: So don't forget to subscribe and maybe share with a friend if you feel like they could use it as well. So the, almost their tech frontier. There have been a lot of tech platforms that I have tried along the way to solve problems, and I have tried two particular ones. One was Therapy Flow and one was their SaaS. I think they're both must be built out of the same thing because it's not super intuitive for the everyday therapist to do what you got it for.
[00:16:57] Colleen: And while they're both pretty affordable and accessible, and I did find the customer service was great with the therapy flow, not so much. There was a lot of like, you would have to join there. Support meeting and then try to kind of like vibe with the other people that were all there trying to get their support questions answered.
[00:17:23] Colleen: And if you can imagine a bunch of therapists trying to figure out how to build a form when on the left it's clicking sites, like that's not super intuitive, right? So I feel like. It is not quite there yet in terms of plug and play, and I consider myself pretty tech forward when it comes to these things.
[00:17:41] Colleen: So for the everyday therapist, that is not. Into or using tech a lot. I think that these are still not quite there yet and could be pretty frustrating for the everyday therapist who's just trying to find a simple CRM tool to manage their patients. I think that having something that is more plug and play like an Admirra.
[00:18:04] Colleen: Or even if you think of when you're building a website like Squarespace, it's like pages edit. There's no backend coding. You know what a page is? A page is, A page doesn't say sites for forms. It's very user friendly and intuitive, and I think that that is what we need for therapists. We need more of that.
[00:18:23] Colleen: So take that for what you will.
[00:18:26] Colleen: So a lot of us talk about chat, GPT. I think one, anytime you say that in healthcare, people are like, oh, no, no, no. there's a lot of ways that you can use chat GPT in a HIPAA compliant way outside of simply de-identifying the data, you can also pay for the team's version where you're not training a public bot, you are having your own team's workspace, private bot.
[00:18:51] Colleen: Now it still doesn't mean you can upload patient, like PHI, but it's a bit more of a secure level of, an interface. And then beyond that, there is building GPTs. So building GPTs takes it a step further and it allows you to create these master prompts for. Something will, that will automate a process that maybe you do on a regular basis.
[00:19:17] Colleen: So I'll give you an example. I created a practice manager, GPT, where this would think like a practice manager and it would start to create automations, flows, professional ways of responding to patients, that sort of thing. And our VA, who is offshore, has greatly benefited from this because they were able to then say, how do I respond to this patient who's really upset about their balance?
[00:19:45] Colleen: And then it comes up with this really nice cohesive thing for them to say. So that's one way that you can build a GPT for what you need to do. But the thing to remember is you put trash in, you get trash out. So. Your GPT is only as smart as you are, and that's why the prompting is really, really important.
[00:20:06] Colleen: So I used to hear this a lot prompting, and what does that mean? I don't know how to prompt something. I'm not a coder. And so I just kind of ignored it really for a long time. And then I realized you can use chat GPT to create your master props for you . when you go into chat GPT and you say Create, you can create your own GPT.
[00:20:28] Colleen: And before you do that, you can say to chat GPT, I want to build this thing, this GPT that acts as a practice manager for my practice. And it's able to professionally talk about what it is we do and we do X, Y, and Z. Like we do E-M-D-E-R work, or we see children and teens we're in Michigan, that sort of thing.
[00:20:50] Colleen: Can you help me write a master prompt that will help me do these things? Okay. It will write that master prompt, and you can even say, am I forgetting anything that should be included in a practice manager? Yes. X, Y, and Z. Would you like me to incorporate that in your master prompt? Yes. So it puts that in there and then you can further chat with this GPT.
[00:21:10] Colleen: So you can say. That's not right. What did I, what do I need to change in this prompt for this to be different, for this to have a different output and it will tell you how to tweak it over time. So that's where I love building these GPTs for various functions that I need to automate. Sometimes it's just looking at a p and l and saying, help me analyze this each quarter, and I want you to make sure that you're removing this line item here.
[00:21:37] Colleen: Another example I'll give when you are chatting with Chad, GPT or any LLM for that matter, whether it be, perplexity or Claude or , Jasper, or any of the ones that are out there. If you were to try to do your social media marketing, and I'm sure a lot of people have tried to just say, write me an Instagram post about anxiety, you're gonna get some boring generic.
[00:22:03] Colleen: Anxiety posts that no one looks at and everybody's like, that was just a waste of time. But if you tell it, write 150 word Instagram caption about anxiety. That sounds like a Gen X testing psychologist who's sarcastic, witty, smart, compassionate, and tie it to the concept of burnout from over documentation.
[00:22:26] Colleen: Now you're giving it flavor. You're giving it tone and context. You're giving it a story to tell. So that's the difference between AI. That sounds human and AI. That sounds like a brochure.
[00:22:38] Colleen: Let me back up for a second and just sort of answer what a GPT actually is. So GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer and that's just text speak for a language model that's trained to predict and generate text. So I remember back in the day I would try to use it for recommendations and I bet it's actually better than it was.
[00:22:58] Colleen: But I would say, help me find five therapists in the Orange County area that do EMDR and. It would just hallucinate and make up random therapist. And so it's really important to understand which LLM you're using and what that's particularly for. And I can do another one on the differences.
[00:23:23] Colleen: I can also create like a little cheat sheet on the differences. But Claude, I typically use for better, more sophisticated language perplexity for. Things that perplex me and I'm like, how would I do that? And then , chat, GPT, the different models there, I use for every day stuff, all day, every day.
[00:23:44] Colleen: The practice manager of GPT, let's talk about this for a second. So you train it by feeding it. You put in your practice policies, your onboarding scripts, your SOPs, your staff communication, your org chart, your weekly to-do list. Then you tell it what role you wanted to play your my virtual practice manager, your jobs to help me automate communication with clients.
[00:24:05] Colleen: Draft staff updates, suggest workflow improvements. Now, every time you go to open up chat GPT, you can just say, Hey, check this draft train to a client about late payments, and your custom GPT will answer in your tone. So it's like hiring an operations assistant who never forgets your voice and doesn't need PTO.
[00:24:23] Colleen: All right. Quick intermission for something I am ridiculously excited about reforming our first ever off the train mastermind class of 2026. Okay. This is not another mastermind group where we all sit around and talk about how wonderful everything is going. It's not another group chat. It's not a, another social Hour.
[00:24:44] Colleen: It is a working lab for clinicians who want to , build real, scalable freedom brands. So whether that means passive income products, learning the ops side of running your practice off the chair, or even building it to sell this mastermind will give you the strategy, accountability, and community it takes to make it real.
[00:25:05] Colleen: So if you ever said, I know I can do more, I just sort of need a roadmap, this is it. When we created this podcast, it was just an idea and I don't think I ever would've done it had I not had two other accountability partners where we set a day every. Carved out that time and did it. And here we are above, I think it's, the statistic is 97% of people who start a podcast don't get beyond three episodes.
[00:25:35] Colleen: And here we are at episode 13 or 14, right? So these groups become accountability for you to carve out that space for yourself, and I promise you, you will. See a huge ROI in your investment in the program, in just the passive income products alone that you learn to make and the time that you get back. So head to off the train pod.com/mastermind to learn more and apply.
[00:26:03] Colleen: Also, it is on our Facebook group at off the train.
[00:26:08] Colleen: Back to the show if you would like to go down the rabbit hole yourself of all things that are out there. Couple people I love listening to on YouTube, and I'll just have it playing in the background, is Greg Eisenberg. He's always got a startup idea that's just amazing. And he is, , the inventor of, I believe, late checkout.com and I'm sure a bunch of other things.
[00:26:34] Colleen: And. The way that they use AI and automation and are sort of always on the pulse of things. That's the way that you can really use arbitrage in a niche field like ours. Whether you be in the physical therapy therapist, space, dentist, , discipline, it doesn't matter. else is watching that show. So that's a great show to watch in terms of figuring out how we can take those tools and apply it to clinicians and use it as arbitrage to further get off the chair. and then the other ones that I love are Alex Hormozi. He's great with marketing. Layla Hormozi, his wife, she's great with building and the ops side of things. And so these are some great things for you to just kind of tool around and learn all the different tech tools that are out there.
[00:27:21] Colleen: There's also a website called, there's an AI for that. I believe it's, there's an AI for that.com, and you can just type in whatever you're trying to do. There's an AI for that, so that's another way that you can find more of these tools and resources. Okay, so let's shift gears for a minute, because while these AI tools and automation are sexy, freedom isn't just about tech.
[00:27:45] Colleen: It's about clarity. It's about actually knowing what's happening in your business without spending your whole Saturday buried in spreadsheets. So this next set of tools is all about visibility, seeing where your time, energy, and money are really going. And you've probably heard the saying, if you can measure it, you can move it.
[00:28:03] Colleen: So I'm gonna take it one step further if software can measure for you, you just bought back your Saturday, so let's talk about a little tool called Time Doctor.
[00:28:14] Colleen: During the pandemic, we all went remote, and then after the pandemic, I think we all stayed remote and so we got a lot of double dippers, quiet quitters, and just a lot of nonsense when it came to hiring people and combined that with this feeling of, I don't need to be babysat or micromanaged or I don't wanna be held accountable.
[00:28:41] Colleen: And it becomes a real disaster for your practice in terms of cost containment. So Time Doctor is something that I have used for years that has been really, really helpful and it could be a game changer for you in terms of just managing remote teams. So each of your employees log into it. It could be a browser that's installed in their desktop.
[00:29:03] Colleen: And it will log hours. It will take periodic screenshots. It'll show which apps or sites are open while they're clocked in. And it's not about micromanaging, it's about transparency. So if you are seeing that someone is stuck in your employee handbook for an hour, and you can see, oh, they were trying to find passwords.
[00:29:25] Colleen: That tells you you need to change your onboarding policy so that they better know where to find what they need. Right? So it helps you identify a bottlenecks. Also, you're paying for productivity, not YouTube, rabbit holes, right? So when we first rolled this out, and still to this day, when we ask people to sign part of their employment application, that they're okay with using Time Doctor and what it is.
[00:29:53] Colleen: The only people that tend to have privacy and security concerns are the same people that were usually caught scrolling YouTube or whatever during the time. And so I find it to be a really effective sort of screener for those people who do not want to be held accountable and are maybe already looking to double dip or quiet. Quit.
[00:30:11] Colleen: Time doctor also helps reveal who's working smart and who's working hard. So I had quite a few people that I would hire and I would think their list is just piling up, but I don't feel like anything's getting done. You could see where they're spending most of their time. And I had someone that was a practice manager that was in Gmail for eight hours a day.
[00:30:31] Colleen: Well, that's probably not gonna be super helpful. I need you to be in RingCentral in our CRM and talking to patients and sending copay collections and that sort of thing. So Time Doctor can really help from that standpoint as well, especially when you're training people. And it can also be great for you too when you're wanting to know where your time is being spent and doing your own time studies.
[00:30:52] Colleen: The next tool is Turquoise Health. This is a tool for transparency and. It helps you to learn about what your competitors are being paid in your area. So I wanna get out of this fearmongering that has been spoonfed to clinicians for decades, likely put in place by the very payers who benefit from keeping us flying blind, which is, you're not supposed to discuss rates and it's antitrust and all of this CMS in 2021.
[00:31:26] Colleen: Came back with a requirement, so this is now almost five years ago, where every hospital and payer was supposed to publish their rates publicly.
[00:31:35] Colleen: And of course, technically they did. They complied in the most predictably annoying way possible by dumping millions of lines of data in formats that look like the matrix threw up. So it's full of codes, spreadsheets, cryptic file names that no human could make sense of. That's where tools like Turquoise Health comes in.
[00:31:54] Colleen: So Turquoise takes all of that intentionally obfuscated data and it will translate it into something that you can actually use clean, searchable payer rate information. So you can go there and search by CPT code, you can search by area code. And you can look at cash pay rates versus in-network rates, and it's really, really helpful.
[00:32:16] Colleen: I'm sure there's a million other platforms like it, but that was the one that we used, especially when it's time to go up for renegotiation with our insurance contracts, we use Turquoise Health. In terms of other transparency tools for CPT codes, what others are getting Gmail, that sort of thing. You can always go to data.cms.gov. This is the raw stuff, the federal database where you can technically access all hospital and payer files if you're fluent in spreadsheet. Ribbon Health. It's used more by larger organizations, but it does offer some API driven healthcare pricing and directory data.
[00:32:50] Colleen: And clarify Health and Healthcare Blue Book. They both provide comparative pricing insights and then ZocDocs transparency dashboards. So this is a newer evolving one. It helps patients see estimated out-of-pocket costs, and in turn, it helps clinicians see how their rates compare locally. So all these are really, really helpful to make sure that your rates are the most up to date.
[00:33:12] Colleen: And agAIn, if you don't have to deal with insurance, good for you. Set your own rates.
[00:33:16] Colleen: Next tool is Mentaya and Reimbursify. So this is making insurance work for you. One of my pet peeves, one of my many pet peeves about insurance is that they have made it so difficult and frustrating to actually reach a human there, that the clinicians have become their vicarious employee and. Wouldn't it be nice to say we're actually out of network with your insurance, but here's a super bill or you know, a receipt for our services and here's a couple tools you can use to submit the claim, simply walking through the client through, and you could even make a loom video on your website.
[00:33:55] Colleen: About Mentaya or Reimbursify and how simple it is to get reimbursed. I actually have used both of these tools myself because sometimes submitting a claim through your insurance can be just as frustrating as it is when you're a clinician, and so Mentaya and Reimbursify, I'm sure for a small fee will help that process be just so much easier for your patients so that you don't have to deal with the claims process and they can deal with that.
[00:34:21] Colleen: Another tool. I love the Productive Therapist directory by Uriah Guilford. This thing is genius. I love that there are so many therapists that you can see on there and all the different things that they're doing. Talk about getting off the chair, looking at all these different therapists and seeing that there's some out there that don't do traditional therapy work anymore.
[00:34:45] Colleen: They are social media marketing for people. They're writing copy for people. They're doing Etsy empires. They're helping you streamline your practice. And so the productive therapist directory tool, if you've not used it. It's a free resource and it's absolutely amazing. I love it. It's fantastic. Go check it out.
[00:35:02] Colleen: Notion Plus Airtable, this is the next one. So these are sort of command centers. Think of these like your digital dashboards. This is like the control center of your Starship. And you can use Notion to track everything from your content calendars to client pipelines, to CEU requirements. I use mine kind of like a brain dump.
[00:35:23] Colleen: So everything lives there. Our podcast productions, guest tracking, social media, scheduling, all the various ventures that I've got my hands in, live in Notion, and I've used Google Docs for quite a while, and I really just enjoy the ease of Notion, being able to see it all in one place versus having to.
[00:35:46] Colleen: Sort of click around in Google Docs. So Notion is something that is really, really helpful. Airtable, on the other hand, it's more like a relational database with superpowers. So it lets you track practice metrics, referrals, revenue, cancellations, retention, and it will visualize them for you in charts and dashboards without needing some Excel training course.
[00:36:08] Colleen: so the point isn't just organization With these, it's insight and when you can actually see what's happening in your business at a glance, you can make better decisions faster. So I think most practice owners, unless they have somebody that knows how to do this for them, you're having to tap into every single aspect of your business all week to make sure that all systems are go.
[00:36:28] Colleen: And this gives you that executive dashboard that every CEO needs.
[00:36:32] Colleen: Last tool I'll give for today is Loom. I love Loom and Loom. Has helped me so much in avoiding so many meetings. I don't enjoy a meeting, especially when it could have been said in an email, and so Loom helps you get so much time back. It allows you to share your screen as you're teaching whatever it is that you're doing.
[00:36:57] Colleen: Let's say it's an SOP in your practice, or it's how to find a certAIn thing. And so you can film your screen while doing this, and then the AI transcribes what it is that you are, talking about. It even will edit out your uhs, your ands, the silent parts and things like that so that it will then create an SOP for you.
[00:37:17] Colleen: So you have a handwritten SOP. It's a great, great tool for training. I have had so many of the same training calls when I'm training a report writer or a new clinician on where to find things, and I started using Loom to just record those onboarding sessions. And now I have this SOP that we can refer people to immediately when they're onboarding.
[00:37:41] Colleen: And it's all cohesive. It's all the same. Everybody's getting the same information.
[00:37:46] Colleen: One more tool. Now, I said I wasn't gonna talk about scribes because there's a million scribes out there, but I will say I have used NoteZap AI for a long time. And again, none of these tools. Do I have any skin in the game with, I have no affiliation. These are just things that I like, but.
[00:38:02] Colleen: NoteZa p has been amazing for us, not just because it transcribes what we say. And believe me, that's great because you are able to just sit with a client and have an interaction with them and not have to worry about frantically writing everything down. But sometimes it hears things that we forget or that we don't hear.
[00:38:20] Colleen: And in NoteZap AI, you can customize. The outputs. So this is where it's especially helpful for testing psychologists and just clinicians in general who have to get prior authorizations, or we need to send out a quick coordination of care note. Let's say a psychiatrist is trying to figure out what to prescribe a patient.
[00:38:42] Colleen: They can't wait for a final report to be done, but they need to know this can produce all of that really quickly from that one intake. When we meet with a patient, we will then have NoteZap app going of course the patient signs their consent and all that, that they know that we use this. And then it creates this transcript and you can create these little sort of gpt within each note that spits out medical necessity information.
[00:39:08] Colleen: So it can say, Show that this patient has not tried testing as the first form of intervention, show that this patient's , symptoms are not the result of substance abuse. so we can just plug in all the medical necessity, guidelines and criteria, and it will then create that note for us. So the administrative burden alone that you have to deal with of writing prior authorizations, especially in a testing practice, has been solved with this.
[00:39:32] Colleen: It's all right there. It pulls it out right there from the client's intake. The second piece it can do is treatment, coordination of care, so it can create that note and it becomes a nice marketing referral and resource because now you've got this nice note of, thank you for the referral, Dr. Johnson. We met with your patient today.
[00:39:50] Colleen: We plan to do this testing on April 15th, and we will send you a follow up as soon as they are done. And it's just a nice little, like we got your referral. This patient's being taken care of. It's a great thing. So. You can do 10 different of those types of automations within NoteZap, and I love it for those reasons.
[00:40:06] Colleen: This one is just pure creative play and it's so fun. I'm sure you guys have heard of Dolly or Midjourney, and these are some of the AI image generators. Well. If you've ever played with these, the image generations can be less than perfect, especially if there's text in them, as you'll notice. And so I think a lot of people just sort of give up on it.
[00:40:28] Colleen: And I think from Midjourney, you have to be in a discord group. I don't know, it just was not that strAIghtforward. But God loved Google. They just came out with nano banana. And if you type in nano banana, it will just bring up a very simple Google like box and you can get it to generate pretty much anything that you want to.
[00:40:47] Colleen: Now remember, our first rule, trash in equals trash out. So if you just say, generate me and like, make my headshot look good, it's not gonna, it's not gonna give you what you want. So what I typically will do is I go into chat GPT, and I will say. Can you put me in like, sort of like a modern looking suit.
[00:41:10] Colleen: I'm sitting on like stool something casual, minimalist, modern. I can even take images from Pinterest and say, I really like the vibe and the aesthetic of this. How might I describe this to Nano Banana and then chat, GPT will help me create that master prompt that then goes into nano banana and creates these awesome things.
[00:41:32] Colleen: And I'll share on our Facebook group and on Instagram, these tools that have been generated. It will blow your mind. First off, how professional would it look to have all of your clinicians. Or all of the people that worked in your practice to have the same cohesive photograph. Everybody's sitting in the same studio, lighting, uniform colors, just looking so professional.
[00:41:58] Colleen: How much money would that take? How much coordination would that take? Alright, everybody. If photographer's gonna be here on Thursday, October 22nd, oh well, Sally's out then do we wanna, you know? No. This does it in about five seconds, and it is a game changer. If you are still using your Olin Mills headshot from 1994, do yourself a favor.
[00:42:19] Colleen: Go to Google Nano Banana and say, take my exact likeness that I'm uploading here and make me a great professional headshot that signals. Healing and peace and comfort. Put some earth tone scarves around me and put me in a therapist chair . However you wanna look, right, whatever your vibe is, it will do all that.
[00:42:42] Colleen: And I can even go back to chat to BT and say, well, it gave me this then. That's not what I was looking for, I was looking for for this. And it will help me tweak that prompt. So play around with it. Have fun. Nano banana. I just minds blown.
[00:42:56] Colleen: So hopefully this gave you some really good stuff today.
[00:43:00] Colleen: So if you loved this one, please do me a favor, subscribe, rate, and share it with another clinician who's ready to stop trading their time for money. Subscribing does not just help us by the way. It helps. You stop losing momentum because let's be honest, life gets busy. You'll hear an idea, you'll love it, and then by next week, you're just back in the hamster wheel, right?
[00:43:21] Colleen: When you subscribe, we show up in your feed like that colleague who gently reminds you, Hey, remember you said you wanted to stop taking 30 clients a week? So it's not about algorithms, it's about accountability.
[00:43:32] Colleen: Subscribing to this channel is how you plant that seed for freedom. So every episode is just a small nudge, a tool, a mindset shift, a shortcut that pulls you closer to the business and the life you actually want. So we're not trying to fill your notifications or your inbox, we're trying to fill your toolbox.
[00:43:52] Colleen: You'll find all the tools we mentioned today in our show notes, and if you join our Facebook group at facebook.com/offthe chair, you'll get daily tips, many tutorials and reminders that retirement doesn't have to mean burnout at 75. I'll see you next week. Same mic, new freedom.
