Northlight Therapy
A four-person psychology practice that stopped doing notes on Sunday nights and cut no-shows by a third without charging a fee.
- −34%
- no-shows in the first quarter
- 0
- evenings spent on notes since
- 6 min
- average note time after a session
I stopped doing paperwork on Sunday nights. That is the whole review.
Northlight is four clinical psychologists sharing two rooms in central Malmö. Until 2022 the practice ran on a shared spreadsheet for the calendar, paper notes locked in a cabinet, and a monthly evening where somebody reconciled payments against sessions.
What was actually wrong
The founders did not think they had a software problem. They thought they had a Sunday-night problem: notes were written at the weekend because there was never time between sessions, and the calendar was managed by whoever was least busy that day. Cancellations were refilled by text message, when anyone remembered.
What changed
Scheduling moved first. Clients booked into session types with their own duration and buffer, so a 90-minute assessment could no longer land in a 50-minute gap. Reminders went out at 72 and 3 hours. The waitlist filled cancellations automatically — the practice’s first “we should have done this years ago” moment.
Notes followed six months later. The team chose a DAP template, then trimmed it. Signing a note now takes the time it takes to write it; nothing is copied anywhere else, and the session that produced it is already reconciled.
Telehealth arrived during a winter when half the caseload wanted to stay home. Video rooms open from the appointment, the note opens in the same window, and nobody sends links.
Where it is now
The Sunday-night session no longer exists. No-shows fell by roughly a third in the first quarter, without a cancellation fee — the practice still does not charge one. The founder’s review, quoted above, is the entire review she sent.
Sample story. Northlight Therapy is a fictional practice created for this theme; the figures are illustrative.