ABSTRACT Background Despite the ubiquity of chart notes and their well-known impact on medical providers’ job stress and satisfaction, little is known about how mental health providers interact with and are impacted by documentation requirements, particularly in school environments. Objective This qualitative study sought to investigate school mental health providers’ perspectives on and experiences with documentation. Method Four focus groups with eight school mental health providers were conducted. Providers were asked about their current documentation practices and desired changes to their electronic health record system. Recordings of focus groups were transcribed and analyzed for themes using a rapid qualitative analytic approach. Results Key themes revolved around the purpose, features, time demands, training needs, and writing processes surrounding chart notes. Providers reported spending substantial time and energy on documentation and viewed chart notes primarily as a billing requirement, but also valued their utility for treatment planning, outcome monitoring, and clinical accountability. Providers expressed frustration with redundant data entry, lack of protected time for documentation, insufficient training for and communication around updates to documentation requirements, and strained interactions with supervisors during editing. Providers highlighted scheduling protected work time for documentation, enhancing documentation training with a focus on habit formation, standardizing supervisory expectations and providing documentation specific training for supervisors, and redesigning electronic health record interfaces with automation and checklists as strategies that could improve their experiences with chart notes. Conclusions Providers highlighted the ways current training and supervision practices, time constraints, and electronic health record functionality contribute to job stress and burnout while also noting the value of documentation for treatment planning and processing difficult emotions. Roadmaps outlining further research that is needed to understand these suggestions from providers in the larger context of clinical documentation, as well their potential benefits and tradeoffs for providers and other stakeholders, are discussed.
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