Before ClinicNote, a single client case at the New Mexico State University clinic could live in half a dozen places at once: a hard paper copy in a folder, a Word document marked up in red, and a string of email threads stretching across the week. Documentation moved by attachment. Feedback moved by reply-all. And every supervisor and student in the program had to keep track of which version was the current one.
The Challenge
The NMSU clinic serves its community directly. There is no doctor referral required. People in Las Cruces and the surrounding area go to the clinic's website, fill out a form, and get an evaluation started, and a steady stream of NMSU students train alongside the faculty who supervise them.
Katrina Ogaz, the clinic's coordinator of clinical education, was a student in the program before ClinicNote arrived. She remembers what documentation used to demand.
"Prior to ClinicNote there was a lot of emailing, there were some hard paper copies, there was emailing back and forth, put it in Word, put it in red, and we had to go and edit it," she recalls. "It was a lot of exchange and a lot of email threads."
For a clinic with many clinical educators, many students, and many clients, every note meant a new round trip. Open the email, download the document, make the edits, attach it again, send it back, then start another thread next week for the same case.
"I really don't ever want to go back to those days," Katrina says.
What the program needed was a single place to keep everything safely. "We needed a place to hub all of our client information safely, have all of our notes in one spot, and do the back and forth, but with a more at-ease way of things," she explains.
Finding ClinicNote
The push to change came from the top. The department head heard about ClinicNote at a CAPCSD conference, back when the platform was still early in its life.
"She said, this is barely starting out, we don't know what it's like, but we're going to roll with it and try to make our lives easier," Katrina recalls. "They seem to be a reliable source, and we're going to try it. So we did."
It was an early bet on a young product, made by a team that trusted the people behind it. That bet has paid off.
"Since then it has been amazing that we have everything all in one spot," Katrina says. "It has been a lifesaver to us."
Implementation and Onboarding
Katrina was not the coordinator when the clinic first brought ClinicNote online, so she is candid about the one part of setup she heard was real work: getting years of existing client information into the system.
"It was more of just adding the information in that was tedious, for all the clientele that we had," she says. "Not really difficult, just a lot of work right at the beginning."
Since then, onboarding has become an ongoing, shared effort, shaped by a department that has seen some turnover and is steadily bringing new faculty on board. Katrina runs an orientation meeting for each new clinical educator and each new student cohort, walking them through where to find SOAP notes, evaluation reports, and client communication.
What happens after that meeting is her favorite part. The team keeps teaching itself.
"Each of the CEs I've had here, they've gone in by themselves and started playing with ClinicNote, and we teach each other," she says. "She's like, hey, just found out that you can get the data and it creates a graph for you on the qualitative data portion of the SOAP note."
The Results
Hours reclaimed from the email shuffle. The old download-edit-resend loop is gone. "It has cut down our time from having to do those multiple exchanges through email," Katrina says. "No, everything's here by click of a button. I'm going to open it up, save my edits, check my changes, and then send it to the student." She doesn't have to start a fresh thread for every week of a single case anymore.
Everything in one secure place. Client information, notes, evaluations, and communication all live in the same system instead of scattered across inboxes, laptops, and paper. "The ease of it now is so nice."
Templates students can build on. Clinicians upload their own templates, and students work from SOAP note versions they can carry forward. "For students it's the SOAP note version where they can save their progress from last time and then just change it the next session," Katrina says.
Track changes that make supervision clear. With many students and a busy campus, supervisors need to see exactly what they asked a student to fix. Track changes does that. "What did I tell you to edit? Oh wait, let me go look back to see what I told you, because there's a lot happening here on campus."
Students who trust the system with their work. The anxiety of a lost file is gone. "With the students, they love ClinicNote because they don't have to worry about their SOAP notes. Everything's there," Katrina says. "They don't have to worry about putting them in a file on their laptop. It's all stored in one place for them."
Looking Ahead
Katrina is the first to say her clinic has more of ClinicNote to grow into. Between faculty turnover and the pace of a working training clinic, she feels the program is still discovering everything the platform can do.
"I feel like I'm not tapping into the full capabilities of ClinicNote, and I'm needing to do that," she says. She would welcome a ClinicNote 101 video library her students and supervisors could lean on, something that goes beyond basic navigation so the team can use every feature with confidence. She is also working on bringing more parents and caregivers onto the patient portal, a communication effort she sees as the clinic's own to lead.
That ambition comes from a good place. Katrina met founder Lana Fox at a conference this year and came away excited about what the team is building.
"I love ClinicNote," she says. "It's so awesome and easy for us now."
About New Mexico State University Clinic
The New Mexico State University clinic in Las Cruces provides speech and hearing services to the surrounding community, with no doctor referral required. It serves community members and NMSU students alike, and doubles as a training ground where clinical education students learn under faculty supervision.
"I really don't ever want to go back to those days. Everything's here by click of a button now, and the ease of it is so nice."
— Katrina Ogaz, Coordinator of Clinical Education, New Mexico State University