Crestline Psychiatry Associates is a mid-size psychiatric practice based in Portland, OR, serving patients across outpatient therapy, medication management, and crisis stabilisation. Psychiatric documentation is uniquely sensitive — notes must be accurate, carefully worded, and compliant with strict privacy standards. For Dr. Marcus Webb and his team, getting that right had always meant long hours after clinic.
The concern going into any ambient tool evaluation was privacy. "Our patients share things in session that are deeply personal," Dr. Webb said. "Before we could consider any technology that listened to our encounters, we needed to be completely confident about how audio was handled." Diagnose's HIPAA-compliant infrastructure and automatic audio deletion on note completion addressed that concern directly.
The psychiatry model's handling of sensitive clinical language was the second test. Previous tools had documented patient disclosures too literally, creating notes that read more like transcripts than clinical records. Diagnose's updated psychiatry model applied clinical judgment to what belonged in the note versus what was contextual conversation. "The notes read the way a psychiatrist would write them," Dr. Webb said. "That distinction matters enormously in our field."
Within a month of going live, Crestline's physicians were finishing their notes before leaving the clinic. Evening charting, which had been a daily expectation for every psychiatrist on the team, stopped entirely. "My team started commenting on it after the first week," Dr. Webb said. "People were leaving on time and nobody could quite believe it."
Crestline has since made Diagnose a standard part of onboarding for every new psychiatrist who joins the practice. For a field already navigating high burnout rates, Dr. Webb sees the impact as straightforward. "We got our evenings back," he said. "That is not a small thing."