Managing 100 + client files a week takes a system. At the Robbins Speech, Language and Hearing Center at Emerson College, that system was paper — stacks of it, tracking patients from three-month-old infants through adults in their 80s, across a wide range of speech, language, and hearing disorders. For a graduate training center with a mission to develop the next generation of clinicians, it was an unsustainable way to operate. Something had to change.
The Robbins Center is Emerson College's on-campus graduate training program , where students get hands-on clinical experience before heading into the field. With roughly 100 clients seen each week, it's a busy operation — and for years, every intake form, session note, and client record lived in a physical file.
"We were feeling like we were in the dark ages with our paper files," recalls Lynn Conners, the clinic's director. "I used to joke it was only in university clinics and maybe an elderly optometrist's office where you would find paper records."
Beyond the sheer volume of paper, the security and coordination challenges were mounting. Intake forms were chased down by hand. Room availability required someone to check in person. For a clinic responsible for both patient care and student training, it was a lot of weight to carry on paper alone.
The team knew it was time to find an EMR — but with graduate students as daily users, they couldn't just choose any platform. It had to be something a brand-new cohort could learn fast.
Donna Ott, who manages client intake and administrative operations, led the search. She started where many clinical operations administrators do: calling peer programs at other universities to find out what they were using, then sitting through demos with every major vendor she could find.
One system emerged as an early frontrunner — until IT got involved. "We got pushed into a further search," Lynn explains, "because the criteria that our IT department was looking for wasn't going to be met by that one system."
Lynn had heard about ClinicNote at a conference — either ASHA or CAPCSD — and brought it to Donna as one more option to evaluate. Donna reached out, and the difference was immediate.
"They were just so inviting and so warm and friendly," Donna says. "The other EMR companies were nice, but they weren't as receptive to our needs. ClinicNote, even though they were in the beginning stages of development, I felt like they were going to be growing and going in the direction of where & what we needed. We could kind of grow with them because we were just starting out, too. It was sort of like we're on a journey together."
For Lynn, one feature stood out above everything else. "What was most appealing to me was the way that students and clinical instructors — their supervisors — can interact within the system to teach clinical writing. That was a really unique feature of ClinicNote and really core to our mission as a graduate training program."
The other systems had more features on paper. But they weren't built for students. ClinicNote was.
Donna worked closely with Lana and Stacy from the ClinicNote team to get the system configured. They didn't try to do everything at once — they started with the basics, migrating what they had from paper into the platform and learning as they went.
"They had all the tutorials right there, and it was easy to navigate through them," Donna says. "You could jump around from one topic to the next with ease. I liked how the training was organized separately for students and administrators so neither group was overwhelmed with too much information. The training was also broken down into small segments of time, so you could watch a section of a training video and then go back to finish it later. It was a very user-friendly, easy platform to learn from. I would highly recommend ClinicNote to other university training programs."
About a year in, Donna reached out for a deeper training session — there were features they hadn't started using yet. Someone from the ClinicNote team made themselves available to come to a staff meeting and answer questions in real time.
How long did it take the team and students to feel comfortable? "It was fast!," Donna says.
Scheduling visibility for the whole team. Before ClinicNote, knowing which rooms were available required physically checking or asking around. Now everyone can see the schedule digitally, in real time. "One of the things I didn't realize was going to be as useful as it is — the scheduler and how everyone has access to knowing when rooms are available and when they're not," Lynn notes. "All of the team can know what's going on in the different spaces."
Simpler permission management as assignments change. With a rotating cohort of graduate students, user permissions shift constantly. As an admin, Lynn says the process is now straightforward: add permissions, remove them, move on. "That process is really quite simple."
A more secure, centralized intake process. Donna manages all client intakes — creating new files, sharing application materials with families, tracking follow-ups. The patient portal has replaced the paper chase. "I love that I'm not looking for papers and it's easy to track," she says. "Communication through the patient portal is definitely another added security measure — we know it's in one place and it's secure."
Billing flexibility for a non-traditional university model. Most EMR billing workflows are built for insurance-based practices. Emerson's clinic operates differently — sometimes graduate students pay for their own access, sometimes donor gifts cover costs for the college. "The ClinicNote team has been very receptive to doing those kinds of billing adjustments with us," Lynn says. "That flexibility is a value add for us based on our setting and our fluctuating finances."
Continuous improvement that keeps the team engaged. Perhaps unexpectedly, the team points to ClinicNote's release cadence as one of the things they value most. "They're constantly implementing something new," Donna says. "It's not like, 'okay, we have this program and next year we'll update it.' I always look forward to receiving the ClinicNote newsletter where they introduce new features every quarter. I'm always so excited, thinking to myself what's new? What's coming?"
The Robbins Center is still growing and evolving. New features, including texting capabilities are on the horizon.
The direction is clear. Lynn doesn't hesitate when asked if she would have made the switch earlier. "I would have made it earlier for sure."
The partnership dynamic that drew them to ClinicNote in the first place is still the thing they come back to. "Whenever we have a student issue, they're really responsive and quick to team with us to problem-solve," Lynn says. "They're willing to put things on their growing list at our request."
That's still the journey — and they're still on it together.
The Robbins Speech, Language and Hearing Center is Emerson College's graduate training center, located in Boston, Massachusetts. The center serves approximately 100 clients per week across the full lifespan — from infants to adults — with a wide variety of speech, language, and hearing needs. Its primary mission is to train graduate student clinicians in client-centered and evidence-based care through hands-on supervised clinical experience.
"It was sort of like we're on a journey together. It's been a few years now that we've been using it — and it's hard to remember we were using paper before."
— Donnamarie Ott, Clinical Operations Administrator, Robbins Speech, Language and Hearing Center at Emerson College