Creating and Editing SessionGlance Assessments

One of the hallmarks of SessionGlance is how it turns real psychotherapy appointments into editable psychological assessments. These assessments are designed to support high-quality care and provide the structured documentation needed for CPT 96130 psychological evaluation services.

What makes this especially powerful is that SessionGlance doesn’t just hand you a static report. Instead, it combines your session transcript with your functional ratings, generates a structured draft, and then puts you firmly back in the author’s seat so you can refine, personalize, and attest to the final product.

This post walks through, in detail:

• How to complete the GAF-based functional ratings inside SessionGlance
• How those ratings shape the draft assessment
• How to efficiently edit the report so it reflects your clinical voice and supports 96130 documentation

Step 1: Complete the GAF Assessment Before Transcription

Before SessionGlance generates a draft assessment from your recorded session, you’ll be prompted to complete a Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF)-style rating.

Rather than a single global number, SessionGlance breaks functioning into multiple domains so your ratings are more clinically meaningful and easier to write about later. The core areas include:

• Quality of friendships & family relationships
• Romantic & sexual relationships
• Tolerance for emotion / resilience (“Tolerance” domain)
• Insight & self-understanding (“Insight” domain)
• Problem solving & adaptive coping

Each domain is rated on a 10–1 scale, where higher numbers represent more adaptive functioning and lower numbers describe more severe difficulties. The descriptive anchors in the guide give you language you can later re-use or adapt in your narrative.

How to Think About the 10–1 Scale

You don’t have to memorize every anchor; it helps to think in functional “bands”:

• 10–9: High / superior functioning
  Close, stable, reciprocal relationships; flexible problem solving; good frustration tolerance; emotionally present without being overwhelmed.
• 8–7: Generally good but imperfect
  Overall functioning is solid, with understandable strain (e.g., conflict in one key relationship, situational stress, mild avoidance). Symptoms or vulnerabilities show up but don’t dominate.
• 6–5: Moderate impairment
  Noticeable limitations in friendships, family, work, or school. Greater avoidance, emotional reactivity, and inconsistent follow-through. The person is functioning, but with significant effort and frequent setbacks.
• 4–1: Severe impairment
  Minimal or highly conflictual relationships; marked withdrawal; difficulty managing basic responsibilities; or need for intensive supports. Possible disorganization or psychotic-level functioning at the lowest end.

A good rule of thumb: rate the typical functioning over the recent period (e.g., past week or several sessions), not just the very worst or best day.

Practical Tip: Anchor Each Score in One Sentence

When you select a number, mentally (or in a scratch pad) write a one-sentence justification. For example:

• “Rated a 6 on friendships because she has two close friends but avoids most social invitations and feels easily rejected.”
• “Rated an 8 on problem solving because he consistently follows through on plans at work and home with only minor procrastination.”

Those one-liners become ready-made phrases you can drop into your assessment later, saving time and keeping the narrative tightly aligned with your ratings.

Step 2: Rate Change Over Time in Key Areas

After scoring each domain, SessionGlance then prompts you to rate change across several broad areas of functioning. These typically include:

• Subjective evaluation of symptoms and functioning
• Distress tolerance
• Sense of self and identity stability
• Behavioral repertoire (range of coping behaviors)
• Overall functioning
• Progress in management of the primary disorder

You’re usually asked to characterize change in simple terms (e.g., improved, minimally improved, no change, worsened). These quick ratings do a lot of work for you:

• They help the assessment clearly address, “Is this treatment helping?”
• They guide SessionGlance in generating phrases like “modest improvement,” “ongoing difficulties,” or “clinically significant deterioration.”
• They make it easier to support treatment decisions (continue, modify, intensify, refer).

Example: Translating Change Ratings Into Language

If you’ve marked “Improved” for distress tolerance but “No meaningful change” for behavioral repertoire, your later narrative might read:

“The client has shown improved capacity to sit with intense affect without dissociating or shutting down, yet their day-to-day coping strategies remain relatively narrow and default heavily to avoidance.”

SessionGlance can suggest this style of language; your job is to adjust it so it sounds like you and accurately reflects the client’s experience.

Step 3: Let SessionGlance Generate the Draft Assessment

Once the GAF and change ratings are complete and the session audio has been processed, SessionGlance:

• Transcribes the psychotherapy session
• Identifies clinically relevant content (symptoms, themes, interventions, risk, shifts in functioning)
• Combines this with your domain ratings and change markers
• Produces a draft psychological assessment tailored to the structure needed for CPT 96130

The draft typically includes sections such as:

• Presenting concerns and current clinical focus
• Salient historical or contextual factors as they emerge in session
• Functional snapshot based on your GAF-style ratings
• Symptom and functioning trends (where you indicated change)
• Interventions employed and client responses during the evaluation period
• A short formulation and treatment planning segment

At this stage, think of the assessment as a scaffold: the core pieces are in place, but the tone, emphasis, and nuance still need your clinical touch.

Step 4: Editing the Report So It Reflects Your Voice

SessionGlance is intentionally designed so that you remain the author of the assessment. The system gives you a structured draft; your role is to refine it, correct it, and make it clinically and ethically yours.

After transcription and draft generation, you’ll review, edit, and then attest that you have edited the report before downloading it. Here’s a detailed editing workflow you can follow:

1. Start With the Functional Summary

• Confirm that the functional description matches the numeric ratings you chose.
• Make sure relationships, resilience, insight, and problem solving are reflected in plain language.
• Add one or two integrative sentences, such as:
  “Across domains, the client’s functioning falls in the moderate impairment range, with particular difficulty sustaining reciprocal relationships and following through on agreed-upon coping plans.”

2. Tighten and Humanize the Case Story

• Re-read the presenting concerns and history sections for accuracy and focus.
• Remove automatically generated lines that repeat information or feel generic.
• Add nuance around culture, identity, developmental context, or systemic factors that a transcript alone might miss.

Even a single sentence like “These difficulties occur in the context of ongoing racialized stressors at work” can dramatically improve the clinical accuracy of the report.

3. Align Symptoms, Functioning, and Change Ratings

• Check that your symptom description (e.g., severity of depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms) is consistent with your domain scores and improvement/no-change/deterioration ratings.
• If you rated “deterioration” in overall functioning, make sure the narrative clearly answers:
  • What’s worse? (e.g., sleep, occupational performance, social withdrawal)
  • Over what timeframe?
  • How is this affecting safety, health, or role functioning?

This alignment is crucial for both clinical clarity and 96130 justification.

4. Clarify Risk and Protective Factors

• Carefully scan any risk language (suicide, self-harm, substance use, violence).
• Update it to reflect the most recent assessment—what has changed since the last evaluation?
• Add concrete protective factors: supportive relationships, responsibilities, reasons for living, coping skills, and access to care.

This ensures the assessment isn’t just a symptom list; it becomes a balanced picture of vulnerability and resilience.

5. Connect Back to Treatment Plan and 96130

Because these assessments often support CPT 96130 billing, it’s helpful to explicitly connect your evaluation to treatment planning:

• Note whether treatment is continuing as planned or being modified in light of this evaluation.
• Mention any changes in diagnosis, intensity, or modality of care.
• Briefly state how this evaluation informed those decisions (e.g., recommending IOP, medication consult, or targeted skills work).

This makes it clear you were doing evaluation and integration of data, not just writing a long progress note.

Step 5: Attest and Download

Once you’re satisfied that the assessment:

• Accurately reflects the client’s functioning and change over time
• Incorporates your GAF and change ratings in a coherent way
• Speaks in your own clinical voice and judgment

…you can complete the attestation indicating that you have reviewed and edited the report, and then download or export it for your EHR and billing workflows.

This final step both protects you (you’re not blindly signing off on an untouched AI draft) and reinforces that SessionGlance is a clinical assistant, not an autonomous author.

Best Practices and Common Pitfalls

To get the most out of SessionGlance assessments, it helps to keep a few habits in mind.

Best Practices

• Use anchor ranges: Refer back to the descriptive anchors for ranges like 9–10, 7–8, and 5–6 when assigning scores so each rating reflects a clear, consistent standard.
• Link ratings to examples: Whenever you choose a score, tie it to one or two concrete behaviors or interactions (e.g., recent conversations, work performance) that illustrate why you chose that level.
• Edit soon after the session: Your memory for nuance, nonverbal cues, and contextual details is sharpest within the first day or two, which makes edits faster and more accurate.
• Revisit in consultation: Use SessionGlance assessments in supervision or peer consultation to refine formulations, test your impressions, and ensure key clinical themes are represented in your documentation.

Common Pitfalls

• Over-relying on the draft: Skipping meaningful edits can leave the report feeling generic.
• Vague or contradictory descriptions: If the write-up minimizes difficulties that your ratings suggest are significant (or highlights impairment that your scores don’t reflect), the overall assessment can appear inconsistent and harder to interpret.
• Under-documenting change: If the client clearly improved or worsened and the assessment doesn’t say how, treatment decisions and 96130 justification are harder to support.

Putting It All Together

Creating and editing SessionGlance assessments is ultimately a three-part collaboration:

• You supply structured functional ratings and change markers, along with your clinical judgment.
• SessionGlance uses those inputs and the session transcript to generate a structured, editable draft.
• The final assessment becomes a clear, CPT 96130–ready document that captures your client’s functioning, your conceptualization, and your treatment plan.

Over time, this workflow makes it easier to track how your clients are doing in the domains that matter most, make more precise, data-informed treatment decisions, and document the evaluative work you’re already doing in a format that supports both good care and sustainable billing.

Side note: some of the files you uploaded in earlier sessions may have expired on my end. If you’d like me to reuse a specific guide, outline, or template in future posts, just re-upload it and I can fold it back in.