Live online training for clinicians

Your Practice, Your Call: Choosing AI Tools with Confidence

A working method for deciding whether an AI tool belongs in your practice — and for telling a confident claim apart from a verified one.

A member of a therapist group recently asked whether any AI note-taking tool could make documentation “subpoena proof.” It was a reasonable question from a competent clinician, and the honest answer is no. Understanding why turns out to be far more useful than any product recommendation.

Evaluating a software vendor is a professional discipline. Large healthcare organizations staff it, fund it, and route every purchase through it. You are being asked to do the same job for your practice with no training, no security team, and no legal review — and then to feel that your uncertainty is a personal failing rather than a structural one. It is not.

This session is that professional process, compressed to fit a private practice. It is not a review of products, and no tool is endorsed or discouraged by name.

What the session covers

  • Where your effort actually belongs: the one software decision that cannot be undone, and why almost every other one can.
  • A ten-minute screen that disposes of most of the market, so the remaining work is spent only on tools worth the time.
  • What a signed agreement covers, what a plan tier changes, and how to tell which one you are actually on.
  • Retention, deletion, backups, and logs — what each one does, and why deleting a record does not always remove it.
  • How to read a vendor’s answer, including the difference between a reassuring sentence and a commitment.
  • What a solo practice can safely skip from the enterprise version of this process, and why.

This session

This session has taken place

This run has finished. I teach it again, and the next date is usually set within a few weeks.

Email me about the next one

That opens a message to info@bellwethersvcs.com, and I will let you know when the next date is set. No mailing list and nothing automated — just a note from me.

When
Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 10:00–11:30 a.m. Eastern
Length
90 minutes, including live questions
Where
Online, live
Recording
Teaching portion sent to registrants
Cost
$45 per seat
Seats
Limited to 25

What you take away

The VERIFY Evaluation Worksheet

Two pages. The ten-minute screen, the judgment questions, and a decision record with an annual re-check date. Dated and retained, it doubles as documentation of your reasoning.

The Vendor Question Script

A copy-and-send email, follow-up questions for when the first answers are thin, and a triage for reading what comes back.

Both are sent to registrants and are yours to keep and reuse for any tool you consider later. Registrants also receive a recording of the teaching portion. The discussion is not recorded — colleagues ask candid questions about their own practices, and those should stay in the room.

Who this is for

Practicing clinicians in private or small-group practice who are weighing an AI tool, or already using one and would like to check that decision. No technical background is assumed, and nothing in the session requires any.

This first run is aimed at North Carolina clinicians. Nothing in the method is state-specific, but the examples and the discussion will be, and colleagues who share a jurisdiction tend to ask better questions of each other.

Who is teaching it

Jonathan W. Smith, MA, LCMHCA, NCC, spent twenty years in software engineering before entering the counseling profession. As a senior engineer at a Fortune 500 healthcare company, his responsibilities included evaluating the technology systems the organization was considering adopting, and building and maintaining systems that stored and secured personally identifiable and protected health information. He presented on artificial intelligence in clinical practice at the ACA Conference and Expo and at the ACA Technology and Innovation Summit, both in 2026. He is a doctoral candidate in Counselor Education and Supervision at Liberty University and the founder of Bellwether Professional Services.

He maintains no financial relationship with any AI vendor.

Disclosures

  • This session does not offer continuing education credit. It is professional training, not a CE activity, and it should not be reported as one.
  • It is educational and does not constitute legal advice, nor a compliance determination for any particular tool or practice.
  • No vendor sponsorship. No product recommendations. No affiliate relationships.