How UWM's Training Clinic Streamlined Documentation

What happens when your entire digital infrastructure depends on one faculty member's spare time?

At the UWM Psychology Training Clinic, that question stopped being hypothetical. Their pandemic-era workaround was functional but fragile—and everyone knew it couldn't last forever.

The Challenge

Before ClinicNote, the Psychology Training Clinic at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was managing patient records with paper charts. When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, the clinic scrambled to go digital using Microsoft Teams.

"We just created basically digital file folders for each of the students," recalls Stacey Nye, the clinic director. "It was a little messy. Sending things back and forth to supervisors and cutting and pasting signatures."

A faculty member stepped in to build something more robust—an elaborate system using Microsoft Forms and Qualtrics. It worked, but came with a significant catch: only one person could troubleshoot it, and maintaining it was a full-time job on top of his teaching responsibilities.

After two years, a colleague approached Stacey with a simple request: "We need to find a new system. This is too much for Dr. Lee  to keep working on."

The clinic needed something sustainable. Something that wouldn't depend on one person's technical expertise. Something they could actually afford on a sliding-scale clinic budget.

Finding ClinicNote

Stacey first met ClinicNote founder Lana at the Association of Psychology Training Clinics (APTC) conference.

"She was sitting by herself on this little table," Stacey remembers. "And there was also the big place, Titanium. They were there. But I approached Lana."

What started as a conversation became a formal evaluation. The university's IT department compared three systems: ClinicNote, Titanium, and TherapyNotes.

The differences became clear quickly. Titanium was expensive and inflexible—when Stacey asked about customization, the response was a blunt: "No. That won't be happening." TherapyNotes was polished but priced beyond reach for a small training clinic.

ClinicNote stood out for three reasons:

1. A user-friendly interface

2. The ability to create custom templates

3. A team that invested time upfront to understand the clinic's needs

"I really appreciated all of the time they spent with us," Stacey says. "I wanted to use our templates and it had a whole system there."

Implementation and Onboarding

The clinic spent the summer of 2023 building out their ClinicNote setup. Creating custom templates required collaboration—the ClinicNote team would send drafts, Stacey would provide feedback, and they'd iterate until everything matched the clinic's workflow.

"You have to have time and willingness to work with the people building your templates," Stacey explains. "You know what it should look like. But they don't know what's in your head."

What made the process work was the responsiveness on the other end. When the clinic realized they needed diagnosis codes—thousands of them—the ClinicNote team added them. When an urgent reporting need came up with just a week's notice, they built a custom report to meet the deadline.

"My favorite thing about ClinicNote is the customer support," Stacey says. "Everyone has been so incredibly patient and willing and generous with their time."

Student adoption was immediate. Without preconceived notions about how an EMR "should" work, they picked it up right away. For Stacey, the learning curve took about a semester—not because the system was difficult, but because she had to unlearn old habits.

"You have to let go of the way you used to do things," she advises other clinic directors. "As soon as I learned that, it was great."

The Results

Two years in, the impact on daily operations is clear.

Streamlined clinical documentation. Students write notes directly in the system. Supervisors receive automatic notifications. They can go back and forth as many times as needed until the note is perfect—then sign and finalize with a click.

Digital room scheduling. The clinic replaced their paper calendar with ClinicNote's scheduling system. Room reservations connect directly to appointments and billing. Everything flows together.

Automated compliance. Students who used to delay billing paperwork now complete it automatically—it's built into their workflow. "They just do it now," Stacey says. "It's kind of amazing."

Effortless auditing. Instead of manually combing through files to check for missing paperwork, a teaching assistant can run a report and see gaps instantly.

Consolidated systems. The clinic retired their legacy billing system they'd been maintaining alongside their makeshift Teams solution. Everything lives in one place now.

Seamless file migration. Historical records from the old system were uploaded as PDFs directly into client files in ClinicNote—preserving continuity without losing access to prior documentation.

Strategic Impact

For a university training clinic operating on a sliding scale, sustainability matters as much as functionality. ClinicNote delivered both.

"I would definitely make the same decision again," Stacey says. "I have zero regrets. It's been great, and we've been able to afford it."

The real measure of success? Stacey actively recommends ClinicNote to other clinic directors in her professional network.

"I talk to a lot of people in the clinic directors group about ClinicNote," she says. "I'm responsible for a lot of people getting ClinicNote. The support that we get is tremendous. I really feel like the willingness to try to meet our needs is tremendous."

About the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Psychology Training Clinic

The UWM Psychology Training Clinic provides supervised clinical training for graduate students while offering affordable mental health services to the community on a sliding-scale basis. The clinic has been using ClinicNote since 2023.

"The customer support is over the top. Everyone has been so incredibly patient and willing and generous with their time." — Stacey Nye, PhD, Clinic Director