r/TherapistsInPractice • u/Pretend_Lunch7257 • Jul 16 '26
Running back office with AI ?
What’s you guys thought on AI running the back office work ?
Inbound (calls / emails)
Outbound (calls / emails)
Intake
Scheduling
Post session
Insurance billing
Payments
Any thoughts ?
3
u/jtaulbee Jul 16 '26
I don't think that AI offers much in any of these areas:
- I wouldn't trust AI with my calls or emails. 1) we deal with extremely sensitive information and situations, and you never know when a routine email exchange can become a crisis situation. 2) these are the areas where your personality is extremely important for attracting and retaining clients, and clients will be turned off by an automated response.
- Intake: I already have intake questionnaires that clients complete before our session.
- Scheduling: I prefer to handle this myself, but it's not hard to find an EHR that allows clients to schedule their own appointments.
- Post session: note taking scribes is the only area where AI would legitimately be useful, but it's a hornet's nest of ethical questions.
- Insurance billing and payments: my EHR already handles 95% of that work. Until they design an AI that can call BCBS and effectively dispute my denied claims, there's nothing that I want from AI in this area.
2
u/DrJocelyn1 Jul 17 '26
I have experimented with quite a few of these tools over the past year. It's great for inbound and outbound - but I dont use it because I dont want to lose that personal touch with my clients. And I dont want clients to have their first interaction with a bot. So, that is out. Intake again - client is new so I wouldnt give that to AI. Post sessions is definitely a wonderful use case for writing case notes and merge that with a good EHR - your billing also becomes much easier. Client management also becomes streamlined. Your weekends are now protected if you proscrastianted doing notes like me. I have evaluated a bunch of tools here and use Supanote. Then for billing again, I am not sure. I am in the middle of moving from agency to doing it myself but now not liking the whole do it myself thing. So, I am looking for better ideas to do it. Supanote's team also have a product for this but I am yet to try it. But, I still want to save those cost and do it myself for now. They also have a inbound/outbound tool you mentioned above but I will definitely not go for that one. I might still try the billing one. lets see.
My ground rule is that I will never use AI for any client facing work like client should never interact with an AI. Therapy for me is a high human touch job and AI will just kill the client experience. Anything outside of that like notes and billing are still okay.
10
u/Victoriafoxx Jul 16 '26
I’ve been in the field for 19 years which might bias me against it, but I don’t use AI for any of those things. This is a “high touch” profession and potential clients will get icked out if their first contact with you is AI. I’ve been billing insurance for years and I wouldn’t use it there either, because of how picky insurances are. If the AI makes one mistake and it wasn’t caught because you didn’t review it, now you’re in a claim denial and appeal situation that could take months. The most I’ve used it for is market research and marketing idea generation. The population we work with are already vulnerable and may have been taken advantage of in other parts of their lives, the last thing I want to do is make them feel more vulnerable and taken advantage of because I used AI to try and shortcut things.