Imagine a world where behavioral healthcare is less about shuffling papers or being stuck behind a desk, and more about engaging with clients in ways that truly matter. That’s the world behavioral health AI is shaping—one in which software automation expands and enhances the impact of effective care operations. As a leader in the space, Eleos Health is defining this emerging category. Our goal? Making behavioral health treatment as efficient as it is empathetic—and creating an operational environment that empowers human clinicians to focus on what they do best: caring for others.
Intro to Behavioral Health AI
To start, let’s define behavioral health AI, explain how it positively impacts behavioral health providers and their organizations, and discuss the most beneficial use cases for this type of technology.
What is behavioral health AI?
Behavioral health AI integrates care operations with agile software principles, enabling healthcare providers to automate tedious administrative tasks and thus, spend more time and energy on patient care. It’s like having an intelligent assistant dedicated to enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire patient journey.
“Behavioral health AI means using technology to automate the operational tasks and workflows involved in delivering care. There are many tasks that are inefficient for a clinician to perform—or just not the most effective use of their time—that AI can handle for them.”
-Jennifer Gridley, VP of Marketing, Eleos Health
In the context of behavioral health, AI offers a suite of tools designed to simplify care flows, foster collaboration among care teams, and make life better for both staff and clients.
Why is behavioral health AI important?
The treatment of behavioral health conditions presents a host of unique challenges, given the intricate blend of biological, psychological, and socio-environmental factors as well as the need for personalized, long-term care delivery. This is exactly why behavioral health AI is such a game-changer in the behavioral health field.
Applied across behavioral health, behavioral health AI makes each of the following possible at scale—giving it the power to completely transform care delivery as we know it.
Efficiency: Behavioral health AI cuts documentation time by 50% or more while helping ensure adherence to compliance and billing standards. That means less time wasted creating (and potentially correcting) documentation, making more room for clinicians to focus on delivering the most effective care in the most efficient manner.
Care Quality: Tools that provide session intelligence and care delivery insights enable more informed decision-making, leading to better treatment strategies. They can also improve patient outcomes. In fact, research shows that clients whose therapists use Eleos achieve 3–4x better symptom improvement when compared to treatment as usual. Therapists using Eleos also delivered 35% more evidence-based techniques. All of this enables providers and organizations to collectively raise the bar on the standard of care.
Integrated Care: Behavioral health AI streamlines patient journeys, supports care delivery programs such as the CCBHC model of care, and encourages cooperation and information-sharing across diverse care teams. This is crucial in the behavioral health field, where integrated care can greatly impact patient outcomes.
Continuous Improvement: Behavioral health AI enables continuous evaluation and enhancement of care processes at scale. Consistent data tracking and analysis over time helps providers and supervisors identify improvement areas and implement changes swiftly.
Who can use behavioral health AI?
Behavioral health AI is a powerful tool serving a wide spectrum of behavioral healthcare professionals and entities, including:
Providers: Psychologists, counselors, therapists, and case managers can use behavioral health AI to reduce their administrative burden and improve the quality of care they deliver.
Institutions: Hospitals, clinics, and mental health facilities can use behavioral health AI to enhance the patient experience, attract and retain staff, and help ensure regulatory compliance.
Digital and Virtual Health Providers: Telemedicine and digital health platforms can leverage behavioral health AI to provide high-quality care to users, irrespective of their location.
Managed Care Organizations and Health Insurers: These entities can use behavioral health AI to improve care coordination, ensure compliance with care standards, and manage health outcomes effectively.
Behavioral health AI stands as a transformative tool across the behavioral health landscape, offering opportunities for enhanced efficiency, quality, and integration in care delivery. As the behavioral health AI space continues to evolve, it is poised to play an increasingly pivotal role in shaping the future of behavioral health.
Eleos Health’s Approach to Behavioral Health AI
At Eleos, behavioral health AI is more than a buzzword: it’s the driving force behind our mission to revolutionize behavioral health. Our approach is anchored in our commitment to enabling providers to deliver efficient, patient-centered, and value-driven care—supported by a combination of clinical expertise and advanced technology.
As we push the boundaries of modern technology to meet evolving care operations demands, these are the core pillars supporting our model:
Clinical Expertise: Serving as the bedrock of our solutions, our team of clinical experts work collaboratively with customers to help ensure that our behavioral health AI tools are tailored to meet the unique demands of behavioral health, championing personalized and empathetic care.
“For any technology that leverages AI models, effectively training the models to perform with a high degree of accuracy is critical. For a model specific to behavioral health, that level of training is only possible with input from clinical experts—which is why our clinical team is a core differentiator for us at Eleos. Furthermore, the overall effectiveness of the model hinges on the quality of the data used to train it. By training our models with real-world session data, we enhance their applicability in the intended context: community-based behavioral health clinics.”
– Shiri Sadeh-Sharvit, PhD, Chief Clinical Officer, Eleos Health
Technology-Driven Efficiency: Leveraging advanced AI and Machine Learning (ML), we improve efficiency and provide actionable insights with tools ranging from documentation management and compliance review to evidence-based-care feedback. Plus, our intuitive technology embeds directly into existing workflows (i.e., on top of the EHR), thus simplifying implementation and supporting quick user adoption.
Integrated Care Coordination: We bridge existing gaps in patient care by fostering seamless coordination across diverse care stages and providers, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
Agile and Iterative Improvement: The tech community is known for quickly pivoting to meet user needs—and we certainly hold tight to that principle in support of our customers. Our solutions are designed to be adaptive and always-evolving, accounting for user feedback and leveraging data-driven insights to continuously drive value for the providers who rely on us.
Robust Compliance and Security: There’s nothing more important than securing patient data and adhering to healthcare regulations. Our behavioral health AI solutions are developed in compliance with all relevant regulations, and we prioritize robust security measures to protect patient information.
How do Eleos solutions maintain data security and protect patient information?
There’s nothing more important than making sure private client information stays private and secure. This forms the foundation of client-provider trust, which is why Eleos embeds strict security measures into every aspect of our behavioral health AI platform.
In addition to using secure physical locations and adhering to stringent internal processes for data access, Eleos maintains a host of respected security certifications (including being HIPAA, SOC2, and HITRUST compliant as well as Deloitte and ISO 27001 & 27799 certified). Our data never leaves the US and is always encrypted, both at rest and in transit, and Single Sign-On (SSO) is used for authentication controls and standards.
To continuously ensure technical control is on lock, Eleos conducts annual penetration testing and audits by third parties. We also require our vendors and partners to adhere to these same high standards. Through all of these measures, Eleos seeks to maintain the highest possible level of security for sensitive user data.
Eleos Health’s Behavioral Health AI Functions: The Core Trio
Eleos Health’s behavioral health AI solutions center on three fundamental pillars:
- Documentation Automation
- Session Intelligence and Leadership Reporting
- Compliance Automation
Working in concert, these core components empower providers to transform care delivery, build stronger client-provider relationships, and help ensure steadfast compliance in the dynamic realm of behavioral healthcare.
Streamline Paperwork with Documentation Automation
Administrative demands in behavioral healthcare—especially documentation—place a heavy burden on providers. There’s ever-increasing pressure to maintain comprehensive, accurate records while simultaneously providing quality care.
“Paperwork overload” is a real stressor, and when you add it to the emotional demands that come with working in behavioral health, it’s no surprise that clinician burnout is a growing issue in this field—and a serious threat to the effectiveness and sustainability of the entire healthcare system. behavioral health AI can make a significant impact in this area by automating some of the most time-consuming parts of the note-writing process.
How does behavioral health AI software generate progress notes automatically?
From the clinician’s perspective, this process is straightforward. Once a session is over, the clinician clicks to end the session. The behavioral health AI system takes roughly two minutes to analyze the session data. A short while later, suggested entries for the progress note appear, divided into categories such as data, trends, key moments, interventions, assessment, and plan. The clinician then chooses which automated suggestions to include, adds any edits or details, and submits the final note.
How does the AI technology behind automated documentation work?
From a technical perspective, there’s a lot that goes into making sure that progress notes are accurate, relevant, compliant, and personalized. At the heart of this advanced system are AI and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models—specifically those that have been trained with a massive amount of real-world behavioral health data.
The process begins with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which converts spoken language into written text. Eleos uses ASR to process therapy session recordings into text, which is then further analyzed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) models that convert the raw transcript into progress notes and session insights.
Beyond simple transcription, Eleos leverages NLU to interpret the meaning of individual conversations, which it then uses to draft unique, concise progress notes that focus on essential details while excluding irrelevant information. The system evaluates the session to identify key discussions, the frequency of specific topics, the ratio of dialogue between patient and provider, and even the use of evidence-based techniques.
For a deep dive into how Eleos ensures note quality and accuracy, check out this article by a member of our data science team.
What makes documentation created by behavioral health AI different from other types of AI-generated notes?
The automation found in a behavioral health-specific AI platform is fundamentally different from the “dot phrasing” technology used by some documentation assistance services. “Dot phrasing” is a digital shorthand system where typing a keyword or abbreviation preceded by a period prompts the system to automatically expand the text into a phrase or sentence.
But, it’s only that: shorthand. It’s a useful tool that can save time, but it operates based on predefined rules or templates and lacks the capacity to adapt or provide personalized insights over time. Essentially, it’s a reactive system that executes a predetermined task in response to a specific input.
Meanwhile, the true Augmented Intelligence found in a platform like Eleos is designed to not only generate notes, but also delve into the clinical content of a session and pull out meaningful insights and important concepts. Rather than merely assisting in note-writing, it uses advanced machine learning algorithms to analyze data, draw conclusions, and make predictions—resulting in detailed, unique progress note suggestions.
As a proactive system, it continuously learns and refines its capabilities based on the data it processes as well as each individual user’s behavior, preferences, and note edits. It’s much more than a shortcut for documentation—it’s a tool that can potentially elevate treatment personalization, aid in clinical decision-making, and improve the quality of healthcare overall.
What is “Augmented Intelligence?”
Augmented Intelligence is a flavor of artificial intelligence (AI) that is designed to empower and enhance human capabilities—not replace them.
Several applications of artificial intelligence fall under the AI umbrella, and Augmented Intelligence is one specific branch that Eleos focuses on.
At its core, Augmented Intelligence is about putting human providers at the center of the AI solution. The AI isn’t there to take over, but rather to assist humans in tasks and analyses that would be inefficient or potentially impossible for them to do alone. The goal is to enrich human intelligence with the power of AI, providing behavioral health professionals with tools that enable better and quicker decision-making. This differs from other branches of AI or digital therapeutics, which aim not just to assist, but to stand in place of a provider delivering care.
You could argue that some artificial intelligence technologies fall into the “provider assistance” category. For example, if a robot can carry out the actions or recommendations a provider programs it to execute, perhaps you could say the technology is augmenting the provider’s capacity. But from the perspective of the care recipient, it’s a replacement. Their interaction is not with an actual human anymore.
Augmented Intelligence, as leveraged by Eleos, enhances the provider’s expertise and the therapeutic relationship they develop with the client—but it doesn’t carry out any treatment interventions or decisions for the provider. This thoughtful application of technology is designed to complement human capabilities, allowing providers to work more efficiently and effectively.
“If you give a mathematician a calculator, you just help them save thousands of hours calculating. In the end, they are not less of a mathematician just because the calculator is faster. It’s the same when you give AI tools to a clinician: you augment their abilities. That’s the power of human intelligence plus AI.”
-Samuel Jefroykin, Head of Data Science, Eleos Health
How does documentation automation work with existing patient record systems like EHRs?
There are two ways automation can interact with your current documentation software: integration and embedding. Integration is the route traditionally chosen by most software solutions. This involves engineers on both sides granting permissions and updating code. However, this process can be costly, time-consuming, and detrimental to the speed of user adoption.
Embedding, on the other hand, offers a more agile solution. With this method, the new technology can work alongside your existing web-based solutions through a browser extension—without needing permissions or access codes—thereby bypassing the potential hold-ups that occur with integration. For instance, Eleos Scribe—Eleos Health’s flagship documentation automation solution—embeds easily into web-based EHRs, allowing it to function seamlessly within current workflows.
What are the benefits of behavioral health AI?
The benefits of automated documentation are substantial and transformative for behavioral health clinicians and their employers. A purpose-built behavioral health AI platform:
- Reduces Time Spent on Admin Work: Eleos automatically generates over 70% of the progress note, significantly reducing the administrative burden on clinicians and helping them decrease documentation time by 50% or more.
- Supports Compliance Requirements: Ease of documentation and compliant progress note suggestions help reduce unbilled activities and overall compliance risk. Providers who use Eleos complete 90% of notes within 24 hours of the session—with some organizations reporting submission times as low as 4.4 hours. This helps prevent claim issues and denials, protecting the financial health of healthcare organizations.
- Reduces Provider Stress: 90% of providers who use Eleos report feeling less job-related stress, ultimately bolstering staff morale, supporting recruitment and retention efforts, and improving care quality.
- Improves Accuracy: By leveraging AI and advanced NLU models, Eleos generates accurate, session-specific, clinically detailed documentation—reducing the likelihood of errors or “copy-paste” notes. A recent study showed that Eleos Health’s ML models were highly effective at detecting evidence-based techniques within a therapy session.
These benefits, supported by concrete evidence, show the transformative potential of AI and Augmented Intelligence in the behavioral healthcare sector—particularly in streamlining documentation and alleviating clinician burnout.
Improve Patient Care with Session Intelligence and Leadership Reporting
In the world of behavioral health, achieving a consistent standard of care has always been a key challenge. Factors contributing to this challenge include:
- Variations in treatment approaches
- Lack of transparency into session dynamics
- Inconsistent efforts to enhance care quality by individual clinicians
It’s a complex landscape requiring an innovative solution, and Eleos Health has delivered on that requirement with two sophisticated features: Session Intelligence and Leadership Reporting.
What is Session Intelligence in behavioral health AI?
Session Intelligence is a feature that uses Augmented Intelligence to generate comprehensive insights for individual therapy sessions. Clinicians can analyze a plethora of vital information such as talk-versus-listen ratios, application of therapeutic techniques, care trends over time, and patient-reported outcomes. By providing greater transparency into session happenings, Session Intelligence helps drive improvements in care quality at the provider level.
What does a Session Intelligence summary include?
From a user perspective, Session Intelligence is delivered as a convenient dashboard offering a comprehensive overview of a care session. Within roughly two minutes of the session’s conclusion, it presents talk-versus-listen ratios, keywords, themes, and information on the usage of evidence-based techniques. Session recordings and transcripts as well as supervisor comments are also available in cases where the client has provided explicit consent.
From an AI perspective, Session Intelligence creates detailed, intuitive session summaries by turning narrative, unstructured session data into structured data and analysis. The aim is to offer an objective view of what transpired during the session—beyond what is possible with traditional provider-authored notes. The system identifies techniques the provider used and the client’s responses, silences, and talk times—among other things. These insights offer an in-depth understanding of what the clinician did during the session and how the patient is progressing through treatment.
What is Leadership Reporting in behavioral health AI?
With Leadership Reporting, Eleos further supports healthcare organizations by equipping supervisors and leaders with comprehensive, in-depth visibility into staff activity, caseloads, and performance. In addition to providing insight into key population health metrics and trends, this type of reporting highlights areas for improvement and enables targeted provider training and development.
How do Session Intelligence and Leadership Reporting drive more efficient and effective care?
In the past, providers seeking to improve their clinical skills were limited to engaging in self-led learning, relying on their memories to have discussions with leaders or mentors, or undergoing direct observation from a supervisor. Now, Session Intelligence empowers them to evaluate their practice with concrete data, leading to significant improvements in care quality, efficiency, and outcomes. Meanwhile, Leadership Reporting offers organizational leaders an added layer of intelligence for strategic planning and oversight.
Together, these two types of advanced intelligence can transform the entire care experience. In fact, providers using Eleos have been shown to double client engagement, achieve 3–4x better client symptom reduction, and use 35% more evidence-based techniques.
Strengthen Compliance with Automation
While clinicians and patients are the face of the behavioral health space, there’s also a large—and often overlooked—network of people working behind the scenes to keep all moving parts in check. To that end, supervisors, administrators, and Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) teams are charged with a daunting task: overseeing clinical note compliance to prevent audits, clawbacks, and denials.
The scale of this task is monumental, especially for larger organizations. Given the sheer volume of clinical notes generated each day, it’s unrealistic and impractical to expect a manual review of every single note. Yet, a lack of comprehensive documentation review makes organizations vulnerable to financial threats.
This conundrum underscores the need for a more efficient, less error-prone method of compliance oversight—one that keeps pace with demand without sacrificing the thoroughness of review.
What kind of compliance support does behavioral health AI provide for clinicians and supervisors?
Eleos provides automated compliance support for both clinicians and supervisory or review roles (e.g., the CQI team).
For note-writers—primarily clinicians—behavioral health AI focuses on making sure documentation fulfills all requirements set forth by payers and regulators. Because the system is optimized to generate note suggestions that support compliance and billing standards—and because those suggestions are always unique to the session being documented—providers inherently avoid issues like unbilled activities, cloned notes, lack of connection to the treatment plan (a.k.a. the Golden Thread), and ultimately, clawbacks. Additionally, because providers who use Eleos are able complete and submit their notes much faster—with 90% of notes submitted within 24 hours of service—organizations can avoid issues related to timely filing.
Supervisors and reviewers, on the other hand, get a comprehensive overview of the organization’s compliance status through advanced Leadership Reporting. This allows them to understand broader compliance issues and pinpoint areas that might benefit from additional workforce training or other improvement efforts. By providing a view of aggregated data, the system delivers insights into organization-wide adherence to timely filing guidelines, evidence-based treatment protocols, patient-reported outcomes over time, client satisfaction, and more. This macro perspective supports proactive risk management and quality control.
These features work together to give organizations a more efficient and effective way of managing their compliance risk—helping reduce the threat of audits, claim issues, and denials without the burdensome manual review process.
The Expanding Role of AI in Behavioral Health
Thanks to behavioral health AI, the manual, labor-intensive processes of the past are steadily being replaced by new systems that leverage automation, intelligence, and data-driven insights to elevate care effectiveness and efficiency. Platforms like Eleos Health are pioneering this shift, making automation a critical component of modern care operations.
AI brings significant value to behavioral health organizations in three pivotal areas: documentation, session intelligence, and compliance. By automating and enhancing these aspects of care operations, organizations will not only improve care quality and streamline operational efficiency, but also help ensure regulatory compliance. The ultimate benefit? Freeing clinicians to focus more on their primary mission of delivering exceptional care—rather than getting buried in a pile of time-consuming administrative tasks.
At Eleos Health, we believe that the future of behavioral health isn’t one where therapists are replaced by robots. Instead, the future will bring widespread adoption of intelligent technology to enhance the crucial human element of behavioral healthcare. In the behavioral health AI future, clinicians spend less time on paperwork and more time doing what matters most: helping people live better, fuller lives.
Ready to see what behavioral health AI can do for your organization? Request a demo of Eleos Health’s specialized AI software here.
