TL;DR: I’m interested in how everyone manages charts for couples therapy where the couple (not either individual) is the client.
Hi everyone,
I’m the assistant clinical director at a private practice and was recently tasked by our clinical director with developing an informed consent specifically for couples therapy.
To be clear, when I say couples therapy, I am **not** talking about having an identified client and billing joint sessions with a partner to insurance as family therapy; we are developing the informed consent for therapy where the couple is the client, and they are therefore not using insurance and are instead paying privately.
In the course of this process, we have wondered what the best way is to manage charts for couples. We use TherapyNotes, and it seems like there are a couple ways it could be done. One option discussed would be to have the chart be something like “First name: Smith, last name: Couple” so it shows up as “Smith Couple,” then have the individual partners’ first names listed in the “preferred name” field. Another idea was having two separate charts for each individual and then having their joint sessions recorded as group therapy notes, while any individual sessions would be in the individual charts.
I strongly favor the first option because I feel like, if the couple is the client, the chart should be truly joint and all sessions occurring in the context of couples therapy should be documented there and accessible to both partners. I’m open to any perspectives and ideas about this though.
So, how do you guys handle charting issues like these when it comes to couples therapy?