Write notes that are ethical, efficient, and defensible,
whether you bill Medicare, Medicaid, or commercial
Live 2-hour training with Gabrielle Juliano-Villani, LCSW
Date/Time:
Monday, November 2
4:00–6:00pm ET
Platform:
Zoom | Replay included
$199
Comes with my Documentation Checklist, Progress Note Template, and Intake Assessment Template
Your notes are probably closer than you think, and fixing them usually means writing less, not more.
Clinicians with documentation problems aren't careless. They're thorough people who learned to document for clinical reasons, not for a payer. The effort goes into the parts nobody reviews, and the two or three sentences that would carry the note get left out. The work is already there. It's just in the wrong paragraph.
Sound familiar?
None of that means you're doing it wrong. Nobody gave you the other half of the instructions. That's a two-hour fix, not a career-long one.
$199
“I PASSED my audit of 41 progress notes.
I could not have done it without you and your amazing advice.”
Medicare publishes more about what it expects than any other payer and enforces it more consistently, which makes it a useful benchmark. Commercial plans and state Medicaid programs each have their own quirks, but underneath it all they're asking the same question: does this note show that a skilled clinician provided a medically necessary service that matches the code you billed?
Medicaid reviews are often more aggressive than Medicare ones, and commercial payers are quieter about their standards but will still take money back when they want to.
Write to the Medicare standard and you're covered across your whole caseload. Write to whichever payer is most lenient and you're exposed everywhere else.
I ran a group practice that got up to 15 clinicians and did all the billing myself, which meant I was the person who got the records requests, and also the person reviewing charts my team was sure were fine and finding out they weren’t.
There’s one note I still think about.
It described the session beautifully, the client’s affect, what they talked about, the therapist’s clinical impressions. And it justified almost nothing. Nothing connected the session to the treatment plan, nothing explained why a licensed clinician was needed rather than anyone else, nothing supported the code we’d billed.
As clinical writing, it was good. As a payer document, it was indefensible. I had no idea until I went looking.
Nothing in this training is going to add to your workload. You should leave writing shorter notes that do more for you.
“I’ve been 35+ years in this field and consider myself a compliance specialist when it comes to documentation. However, with that said, I did learn some new perspectives on how to improve our ‘preventive documentation’ at my mental health company. I loved your style, and I feel a ‘safe’ virtual connection with you!”
One by one, using Medicare as the baseline, with notes on where commercial and Medicaid differ. I'll get specific about medical necessity, because telling someone to document it without showing them what that means on the page isn't advice anyone can use. You'll walk out with language you can use in your next session.
They don't read your notes the way you wrote them. They're checking whether your documents agree with each other, so does the treatment plan support the code, does the note support the plan, does the assessment support the diagnosis. You can have three individually decent documents that fail as a set, and I'll show you where those gaps open up.
Which templates help and which ones quietly create risk, how to write during or right after session without it turning into fill-in-the-blank, where AI scribes fit and the ways they can make your documentation worse without you noticing, and what to actually do about the backlog you've already got.
Notes that look identical across different clients, every session billed at the same code, time documentation that doesn't support the units, treatment plans that expired a year and a half ago. Most of this can be sorted in an afternoon once you know what you're looking for, and all of it is a red flag to every payer, not just Medicare.
The first week matters, so we'll go through what to send and what not to volunteer, how the process usually unfolds, what happens if findings come back, and why the worst outcomes tend to come from responding badly rather than documenting badly. We'll also cover how a Medicare TPE, a Medicaid review, and a commercial records request each behave differently.
The live Q&A is the part people tell me afterward was worth the price by itself.
Bring the situation you’ve been too embarrassed to post about in a Facebook group. Bring your state and your payer.
“Gabrielle offers excellent resources and trainings for Medicare billing and documentation. I have completed her trainings and have also had one-on-one consultation with her regarding a Medicare clinical review. I’m happy to say that, with Gabrielle’s assistance, I felt confident to better advocate for my client and was able to demonstrate the medical necessity of continued coverage.”
$199
Run a note against it and you'll know if something's missing instead of going on instinct. Built to the Medicare standard, so it works as a check on any chart you've got.
The one I built for my own practice, laid out so you can't accidentally skip the pieces that matter. Works for any payer.
This is where a lot of compliance problems start, because if the assessment is thin then the treatment plan and every note after it inherit the problem. Get this right and the rest gets easier.
All three are yours to keep and use across your caseload, and across your team’s if you have one.
“I credit your workshops and templates for our success with Medicare. I would be lost without your professional guidance and advice. Much gratitude.”
I’m not going to tell you that you’ll never get audited, since nobody can promise that and you should be skeptical of anyone who tries. What I will say is that whether an audit turns out to be an administrative annoyance or an actual financial problem comes down almost entirely to what’s already sitting in your charts on the day the letter arrives.
Josh did not have clean charts when we started working together. What he had by the end was a system and a clear sense of what mattered.
“We passed our first year annual audit with the state for our agency with zero findings. Apparently that does not happen very often.”
Date/Time:
Monday, November 2 | 4:00–6:00pm ET
Live 2-hour training, Live Q&A, Replay access, Documentation Checklist, Progress Note Template, Intake Assessment Template
Package Rate:
$199
No, this one isn’t a CE training. It’s a working session built around what you’ll actually do differently in your charts on Tuesday afternoon.
Yes. Medicare’s is the strictest standard most of us run into, so documentation built to it holds up elsewhere. I’ll flag where commercial and Medicaid differ as we go, and you can bring your payer to the Q&A.
The principles apply directly and I’ll talk about how Medicaid reviews tend to differ. What I can’t do in a group setting is go program by program through 50 states. Bring your state to the Q&A and I’ll tell you what to watch for.
Yes, everyone who registers gets it, so sign up even if the live time doesn’t work. Send me your questions ahead and I’ll get to them during the Q&A.
Experienced clinicians tend to get a lot out of it, because the longer you’ve been documenting a certain way the less likely anyone has checked it against what payers are actually looking for. You’ll probably find you’re already doing most of it and just need to move where the effort goes. See what Mary said above.
It’s the best time. Getting the habits right from the beginning is much less work than fixing two years of charts.
No, it’s live, and the Q&A is a real part of it.
I don’t think so. A lot of what I’m teaching is about writing less, and we’ll talk directly about handling a backlog that already exists.
Yes, and a lot of practice owners do both. Reach out if you want to register a few people.
You’re doing the work. It’s just that a fair amount of it isn’t protecting you the way you assume it is, and some of what would protect you isn’t getting written down at all. Two hours on November 2 and you’ll know which parts to keep, which to let go of, and what’s missing, across every payer you bill.
When the rooms are full, registration closes.
“Worth every penny spent. Are there free trainings out there? Yes, but I watched and got more confused. Now I can reference them with a clear knowledge base and I am very grateful.”
If you’re not sure whether it’s the right fit, email me at hello@gabriellejulianovillani.com and I’ll tell you straight.