Comprehensive Guide to Effective Therapy Progress Notes

Therapy requires flexibility. Root causes of problems and challenges aren’t usually immediately apparent. Certain techniques help some clients, while different techniques are more helpful for others. As a therapist, you must always be taking in new information and adapting your approach as you see what’s working well and what isn’t.

But even though you must remain flexible, you need a general idea of where you’re going and how you plan to get there. A treatment plan is a roadmap that outlines your anticipated route to helping your client achieve their goals. Progress notes are both the mile markers that indicate how far along you are on the journey and the GPS that tells you when a route is blocked, recommending another road instead.

Treatment plans and progress notes are just as important as your face-to-face time with clients during a session. This guide shows you how to get more out of your treatment plan and therapy progress notes. You’ll learn the elements of a good treatment plan and how to tailor a plan to meet a client’s unique needs, the rules governing therapy progress notes, and the most popular note-taking formats. It will also explain the differences between group therapy notes and individualized group therapy notes and how the two support one another.

How to Develop a Treatment Plan

Developing a treatment plan is a lot like pulling out an old AAA map, spreading it out on the kitchen table, and evaluating all the different ways to get to your destination. Let’s explore what makes a good treatment plan before we dive into the role progress notes play.

What Makes a Good Treatment Plan?

Although there’s no single best way to write a treatment plan, effective plans share four elements in common.

Problem Statements — Problem statements identify the issues the client has expressed interest in addressing. When you write problem statements, make sure you’re writing in behavioral terms, using a tone that’s non-judgemental and free from jargon-laden language.
Goals — Therapy goals are the 30,000-foot view of what you plan to help your client accomplish. Be sure to make them specific but broad enough to cover several smaller objectives, and clearly connect the goals to the problem statements.
Objectives — Objectives are like mini-goals, the individual steps that need to be taken to achieve the primary goal.
Interventions — You’ll also need to chart out the specific techniques you plan to use to help your client reach each goal. The interventions you use may be different for each goal, and they may change. Nothing in the plan is set in stone.

After developing your treatment plan, it’s helpful to create a list of self-check questions to ask yourself to ensure it’s adequately customized to the client, with the client’s direct input. Example questions include:

Does this treatment plan directly address the client’s goals for treatment?
Does this plan leverage the client’s strengths, considering factors like their educational experience, socioeconomic status, lifestyle, family supports, and cultural background?
Was the client involved in creating this plan?

How to Tailor Your Treatment Plan

Each client’s needs are unique. Their prior experience with therapy, education level, family background, lifestyle choices, and many other factors all come into play when creating a custom treatment plan.

If the client has been in therapy before, accessing treatment notes from former therapists (with your client’s permission) can help you better understand the presenting problems they’ve experienced in the past and what’s worked and what hasn’t worked in addressing them.

By extensively involving your client in creating the treatment plan, you’ll have the most thorough understanding of their presenting problems and goals for treatment. If appropriate, the use of rating scales or other assessments can help both better understand the impact and severity of each issue, making it easier to know where to begin. Having a client complete an exposure hierarchy is a good example of the type of informal assessment tool used to customize a treatment plan.

Read Elements of a Clear Counseling Treatment Plan to learn more about how to write an effective treatment plan.

How Good Progress Notes Can Help You Implement a Plan More Effectively

Writing therapy progress notes creates a session-by-session accounting of the twists and turns that a course of therapy inevitably takes. Notes can also indicate when a technique isn’t working well and which other options might work better. Just as no battle plan ever survives the first engagement, your treatment plan will need to be adjusted over time, and progress notes guide you in that process.

Progress notes also make it easy to see how much progress has been made toward specific goals, and when objectives have been met. And they can be a catalyst for celebration and encouragement when a client meets key milestones.

Essentials to Know About Progress Notes

HIPAA requirements regulate the creation, storage, and distribution of therapy progress notes. Properly following these guidelines help protect your practice from legal challenges and damage to your professional reputation.

How Progress Notes are Different from Psychotherapy Notes

Progress notes and psychotherapy notes have important but distinct roles to play during therapy. Psychotherapy notes are your private notes taken down during sessions. They’re used primarily as a memory aid and include information like your hypothesis on a potential diagnosis, observations, and impressions related to the client’s unique needs or circumstance.

Progress notes, by contrast, are the official record of each therapy session. They’re meant to be shared with other members of the client’s care team and insurers when requested. Progress notes include information such as diagnoses, interventions used, and progress toward treatment plan goals.

HIPAA and Notes

HIPAA law contains several provisions that apply to the maintenance and storage of clients’ psychotherapy and progress notes. The Privacy Rule mandates that any documentation containing protected health information (PHI) be properly stored to protect client confidentiality. This rule applies to both hard copy and electronic records. The Security Rule includes additional provisions for securing digital records. Mental health practices are obligated to train everyone with access to mental health records on privacy protocols and must discipline those who violate HIPAA privacy regulations.

Templates for Progress Notes

There’s no universally-accepted format for therapy progress notes. In fact, there’s a whole bowl’s worth of alphabet letters dedicated to template layouts. Here are a few of our favorite templates for progress notes. Pick the one that works best for you to streamline the process and keep things uniform.

SOAP

The SOAP progress note template offers a tight but comprehensive way to summarize your sessions.

Subjective — This section details the session from the client’s perspective. It includes information like the client’s feelings on their progress or lack of progress, the effectiveness of therapy, and goals for the session.
Objective — Next, you’ll list your own observations of the client’s overall demeanor, attitude toward therapy, how they responded to the interventions you used, and any results you achieved.
Assessment — In this section, you’ll digest the information from the above two sections and record your professional opinion. Include data like your clinical impressions and evaluation of their progress towards treatment goals.
Plan — Here’s where you’ll lay out your course of action moving forward. What do you plan to address in the next session, and what interventions do you plan on using? How does your plan relate to the client’s short and long-term treatment goals?

DAP

The DAP note format is an efficient, user-friendly method of writing therapy progress notes.

Data — The data section encompasses all of the information gathered during the session, including information self-reported by the client and your own observations.
Assessment — Here, you’ll synthesize the data gathered above. The assessment section focuses on your interpretation of the client’s progression towards their treatment goals. Are they making progress? Does this information point to a specific diagnosis or issue that should be the topic of a future session?
Plan — This section is where you plan for the next time you meet. Did you assign homework? What is your goal for the next session? Is there anything you need to do to prepare?

BIRP

The BIRP format makes it easy to see how a client responded to the interventions you used in each session.

Behavior — The behavior section is where both the subjective data from the client and the objective data from the therapist find their home.
Interventions — As the name implies, the interventions section is where you’ll record the methods you used to achieve the session’s goal.
Response — The response section describes how the client reacted to your interventions. Did the client make progress in how they thought or felt about the presenting problem?
Plan — In this section, you’ll record when the next session is scheduled and what the focus will be.

Group Therapy Progress Notes

Working with clients in groups can be highly beneficial. Group therapy often provides clients with a sense of support and purpose that can be difficult to replicate in individual therapy. Documenting progress in group sessions isn’t difficult, but it is a little different than writing individual therapy notes. Here’s what you need to know.

How Group Notes Differ from Individual Notes

Group therapy notes describe the group as a whole without including identifying information for clients. Group notes identify the topic, interventions used, and the group dynamic. But even when therapy is provided wholly within a group setting, most insurers require an individualized group note for each client. For this reason, you’ll need to create an individualized group note for each client that includes the general group note at the beginning and then describes how the individual client engaged within the group. The individualized note should also include information specific to their diagnoses, individual treatment plan, etc. With this type of progress note, you’ll describe how the client reacted to the group and, in turn, how the group responded to the client.

Read How to Write Group Therapy Notes to learn more about writing group therapy notes.

How Group Notes and Individual Notes Work Together

In group therapy, an individual client’s progress happens within the context of the group. As the group of participants interacts with and influences a particular client’s growth and understanding, the client, in turn, exerts their own force on the group as a whole. In group therapy, capturing this dynamic in a progress note is important. An individualized group note blends the information about the group as a whole with information on the individual client, creating a complete picture of what happened in a session.

Treatment Plan + Progress Notes = Your Wayfinder

A treatment plan and therapy progress notes work together to form a wayfinder for your work with an individual client. Good therapy progress notes support the treatment plan by providing a running record of the client’s successes, struggles, and ongoing needs. And they allow you to see when you need to change your approach for better success.

Explore how MyClientsPlus makes keeping progress notes simpler and sign up for a free trial!