Topic · AI notes for SimplePractice
AI therapy notes for SimplePractice — paste-ready drafts without the cloud round trip
SimplePractice has no built-in AI scribe. The integrations offered by third-party vendors all route audio through their cloud. TherapyDraft flips that: the draft is produced on your Mac, then pasted into SimplePractice's progress-note editor like any other text.
TL;DR
SimplePractice is the EHR of choice for roughly a quarter of solo private-practice therapists in the US. It does not have a native AI scribe feature as of 2026. Every AI-scribe "SimplePractice integration" on the market is actually a cloud vendor that takes your session audio, processes it in their cloud, and returns text. TherapyDraft has no integration — by design. Instead, it drafts your note locally on your Mac in the format SimplePractice expects, formatted for clean paste into SimplePractice's rich-text progress note. No client data touches a server except SimplePractice's own.
The state of AI in SimplePractice as of 2026
SimplePractice's 2025–2026 roadmap added AI-assisted coding suggestions and a claim-scrubber assistant, but the progress-note editor itself remains manual. This is not an oversight — SimplePractice's BAA posture is conservative, and building an in-product AI scribe would require them to take on a substantially larger subprocessor footprint. For clinicians who value that conservatism (and many do — it's a reason they chose SimplePractice), the right AI scribe is an external tool that never hands SimplePractice or anyone else more data than it already has.
The TherapyDraft → SimplePractice workflow
- Record or import audio. Use the Mac's built-in microphone, a lavalier, or an exported audio file from your session-recording app of choice. Audio is saved to TherapyDraft's local Application Support directory.
- Draft locally. Click "Draft" in TherapyDraft, choose SOAP or DAP (SimplePractice's two most-used formats), and wait 2–5 minutes while whisper.cpp transcribes and Qwen 2.5 14B drafts on your Mac.
- Copy as "SimplePractice-paste." TherapyDraft's export menu includes a SimplePractice preset: plain text, short paragraphs, no markdown bullets (which SimplePractice's editor mangles), explicit SOAP section headers that match SimplePractice's template labels.
- Paste into the progress note. Open the session in SimplePractice, click in the progress-note editor, paste. The formatting survives cleanly; you review and edit in-place.
- Sign and submit. The note is yours to review and sign in SimplePractice, exactly as if you'd typed it. SimplePractice's audit log records your signature as the author, which is correct — you're the clinician, the AI produced the draft.
Typical end-to-end time savings on a 50-minute session is 15–25 minutes of typing replaced by 2 minutes of review-and-edit.
Why this is better than an "integrated" AI scribe
Superficially, "copy-paste" sounds worse than "automatic." In practice it's the opposite, for three reasons:
- Audio doesn't leave your Mac. Integrated AI scribes upload the session to their cloud. That's a new subprocessor you have to list on your Notice of Privacy Practices, a new breach surface, a new BAA. TherapyDraft adds zero of those.
- You review before submitting. The extra second of friction — paste, read, edit, save — is a real clinical-quality gate. Integrated "auto-submit" flows are where bad-note-entered-into-chart incidents tend to happen.
- SimplePractice doesn't get a new subprocessor relationship. SimplePractice themselves will have to add BAA coverage for any AI scribe they integrate natively. Until they do, the external-tool-plus-paste workflow is the path with the fewest trust points.
What to paste for each note type in SimplePractice
SimplePractice's progress-note editor honors basic paragraphs and bold labels but strips markdown bullets. TherapyDraft's export presets produce the right shape for each format:
- SOAP — four labeled sections (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) in that order, each as a paragraph.
- DAP — three labeled sections (Data, Assessment, Plan). The "Data" section typically runs longer than the other two.
- BIRP — Behavior, Intervention, Response, Plan. Clinically more work-focused; often preferred for insurance-billing-heavy caseloads.
- GIRP — Goals, Intervention, Response, Plan. Preferred by outcome-measured and goal-oriented modalities.
All four formats are in every plan, including the free trial. SimplePractice-paste preset is the default on the export menu; switch to PDF, markdown, or plain-text for other destinations.
For clinicians on other EHRs
The same workflow applies to TheraNest, TherapyNotes, Jane, Valant, and anything else with a rich-text or plain-text progress-note editor. TherapyDraft's export menu has presets for the top EHRs and a generic "paste to anything" option for the rest. The paste fidelity is tested quarterly against each EHR's web editor.
Related questions
Do I need SimplePractice's permission to use an external AI scribe?
No. You're the clinician and SimplePractice is your EHR; you're free to produce notes with any tool you like and paste them into the chart. The BAA you signed with SimplePractice covers SimplePractice's handling of data; it doesn't restrict what happens on your own Mac before you paste.
Does the paste lose any SimplePractice-specific formatting?
Not in practice. SimplePractice's editor accepts plain text and paragraph breaks. Bullet lists are the one thing it handles inconsistently; TherapyDraft's preset avoids them.
What about diagnosis codes?
TherapyDraft drafts the narrative note; it does not auto-code. Diagnosis and procedure codes are a clinical-responsibility decision that belongs to the clinician in SimplePractice's own billing-code picker. We deliberately don't touch this.