Setting up Yesoma for a therapy private practice

Yesoma is built for the practice management layer of a therapy private practice — intake scheduling, cancellation and no-show policies, insurance billing reminders, and the administrative communications that surround clinical work. It does not touch the clinical layer. Your session notes, treatment plans, diagnoses, and clinical communications live in your EHR and secure client portal, not here. This guide walks through what the therapy playbook seeds into your workspace and how each piece is calibrated for the specific constraints of a regulated mental health practice.

1. Applying the therapy playbook during onboarding

When you reach the industry picker in onboarding, select Therapy / counseling private practice. Yesoma will pre-load your workspace with eight services, seven policies, eight FAQs, eight reply templates, and a follow-up cadence designed around how a private practice actually runs.

Everything the playbook seeds is a starting point, not a final answer. After onboarding, every service price, policy line, template body, and FAQ answer is editable from Settings. The playbook covers the common ground — the structure and language that applies to most solo and small-group practices — so you are not writing from scratch. You bring the clinical specifics: your accepted populations, specialties, modalities, insurance panel, and the nuances of how you run your practice.

If you have already completed onboarding with a different industry selection, go to Settings → Business Brain → Reapply playbook to switch to the therapy playbook. This does not delete data you have already added, but it will overwrite services and templates with the playbook content.

2. The practice management layer Yesoma covers — and what stays in your EHR

Yesoma handles the administrative envelope around your clinical work. It does not replace, interface with, or duplicate your EHR (Electronic Health Record) system. The boundary matters and the playbook is built around it.

What Yesoma manages:

• Inbound inquiries from prospective clients — first contact, qualification, and intake scheduling
• Administrative communications: scheduling confirmations, cancellation and reschedule notices, billing reminders, payment policy explanations
• Cancellation and no-show fee processing (via the credit card on file)
• Insurance verification workflows — collecting plan details and communicating benefit information before the first session
• Letter writing and paperwork requests — intake, scoping, fee estimate, and delivery coordination
• Waitlist management and referral-out communications
• Follow-up cadence for intake paperwork completion

What stays in your EHR and secure portal:

• All clinical session notes and progress notes
• Treatment plans and clinical goals
• Diagnoses and clinical assessments
• Signed consent forms and releases of information
• Secure messaging about clinical content
• Telehealth session delivery
• HIPAA-required notice of privacy practices

The playbook's HIPAA policy (seeded into Settings → Policies) includes explicit guidance to clients that email and SMS communications through Yesoma are for administrative purposes only. Review and customize this policy to match your actual communication protocols.

3. HIPAA-aware communication patterns — what to say and what to avoid over email and SMS

The therapy playbook defaults all templates to the email channel rather than WhatsApp or SMS. This reflects the clinical reality: email is not HIPAA-compliant by default, but it is more appropriate than SMS for administrative communications in a healthcare context, and most clients in a therapy practice expect email for non-clinical correspondence. If you use a HIPAA-compliant email service (one that provides a Business Associate Agreement), note that on your intake paperwork.

What is appropriate to communicate over email and SMS via Yesoma:

• Scheduling, confirmations, and cancellations
• Billing reminders and fee policy explanations
• Insurance verification logistics (plan name, member ID, benefits summary)
• Intake paperwork instructions (directing clients to the secure portal)
• Availability and waitlist status
• Referral information

What should not go through email or SMS:

• Clinical content of any kind — presenting concerns beyond the most general description, session content, diagnoses, treatment history
• Sensitive personal health details that go beyond what is necessary for scheduling
• Crisis content or risk disclosures (see section 5 on crisis language)

The first-reply template in the playbook explicitly asks clients to keep their initial message brief — "what brought you to look for support" — and notes that clinical details are handled in the session, not over email. This framing protects both the client's privacy and the practice's HIPAA posture.

If a prospective client sends you detailed clinical information in an inquiry message, reply through Yesoma acknowledging you received it, note that you will address it in the intake session, and direct them not to send further clinical content by email. Make a note in the case thread.

4. Insurance vs private pay — how the templates handle both

The therapy playbook includes distinct flows for insurance clients and private pay clients. Because most practices mix both, the templates use bracketed placeholders that you complete before sending.

Insurance workflow:

The insurance verification request template collects the client's carrier, member ID, group number, and date of birth so you can verify benefits before the first session. The template also instructs clients to verify their own out-of-network mental health benefits directly with their insurer — a step that prevents billing surprises and is in the client's interest to complete independently.

The insurance policy seeded in the playbook covers three scenarios:

• In-network: co-pays collected at time of service
• Out-of-network: monthly superbill provided; client submits to insurer for reimbursement
• Good Faith Estimate: required for private pay clients under the No Surprises Act

Update the insurance policy in Settings → Policies to reflect your actual panel, your superbill cadence, and whether you currently have a BAA with your email provider. The placeholder text [Psychology Today / practice website] should be replaced with your actual profile URL.

Private pay workflow:

Private pay clients receive the intake scheduling confirmation template with the session fee populated. The payment and insurance reminder template has bracketed sections for both insurance and private pay clients — send the version that applies, or edit the template to create two separate versions in Settings → Templates.

5. Crisis language — guardrails built into the playbook

Every template, FAQ, and policy in the therapy playbook that touches on availability or response time includes an explicit crisis disclaimer. This is deliberate and should not be removed.

The core language, which appears throughout the playbook:

"This practice is not a crisis service. If you are in crisis, please call 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line), call 911, or go to your nearest emergency room."

This language serves two purposes. First, it is accurate and important — a prospective client who is in crisis and finds this practice by searching online needs to know immediately that they cannot rely on a 1–2 business day email response for urgent support. Second, implying emergency availability when none exists is an ethical and liability issue that the playbook is specifically designed to avoid.

Where the crisis language appears in the playbook:

• responsePromise field — shown throughout the workspace and in the onboarding confirmation
• First reply template — closing paragraph
• Intake scheduling confirmation — note before signature
• Crisis FAQ — the entire answer is a direct, unambiguous redirect to crisis resources
• Crisis and after-hours policy — seeded in Settings → Policies

When you customize your templates, preserve the crisis language in the first reply and intake confirmation at minimum. If you do have a crisis protocol for established clients (an after-hours line, a covering clinician, a specific voicemail), add that information to the crisis policy in Settings → Policies and reference it in the intake confirmation template. Do not remove the 988 / 911 language — supplement it.

The response promise in this playbook is set to "1–2 business days," not hours. Do not shorten this to same-day or within hours unless you have operational capacity to support it reliably. Overpromising response time to a prospective therapy client and then not meeting it is worse than setting a conservative expectation from the start.

6. Why review request defaults are different for therapy

The therapy playbook sets the review request flow differently from every other Yesoma industry playbook, and the reasons are worth understanding so you do not inadvertently undo them during setup.

Default destination is Yelp, not Google. Most Yesoma playbooks default to Google reviews because Google visibility matters for local discovery. For a therapy practice, a Google review is a public statement that a specific person received mental health services from a specific clinician. Many clients — even clients who had an excellent experience — would not want that information publicly indexed. Yelp is the default because it is a more expected context for professional service reviews and clients who find it appropriate are more likely to opt in willingly. Psychology Today profile feedback is another appropriate destination; consider updating the destination in Settings → Review request to match your actual Psychology Today URL.

Delay is set to 90 days, not 1–7 days. Standard service businesses ask for reviews within 24–72 hours while the experience is fresh. Therapy is different. A client who is in the middle of active treatment is not in a position to evaluate whether therapy is working, and asking them to write a public review during treatment raises its own ethical questions. The 90-day delay is a minimum — it is intended to fire after a client has clearly transitioned out of active treatment.

Reviews should be opt-in only, never automatically sent. The review request message seeded in the playbook is explicit: only ask when the client has initiated termination with a positive outcome, the client has offered positive feedback themselves, and you have reason to believe they are comfortable with public identification. The Yesoma follow-up automation for review requests should not be set to fire automatically for therapy clients. The appropriate use is manual — you identify the right moment and send it intentionally.

Do not ask clients who are still in active treatment. Yesoma's follow-up cadence does not include a post-session review trigger for therapy, unlike the massage therapist or fitness coach playbooks. This is intentional. If you add a review trigger manually in Settings → Follow-up cadence, be sure it is scoped to terminated clients only, not to every completed appointment.

Common questions

I only do individual therapy — do I need all eight services? No. After onboarding, go to Settings → Services and hide or delete any services that do not apply to your practice. The playbook includes couples / family sessions, brief check-ins, letter writing, and group / EAP lines as common additions to an individual practice — remove what you do not offer and add anything that is missing.

My intake session is 90 minutes, not 50. How do I update this? Edit the Initial intake / consultation service in Settings → Services. Update the duration, the description, and the price to match your actual intake structure. The intake scheduling confirmation template uses a bracketed [50 minutes] placeholder — update that template body as well.

I use a HIPAA-compliant email platform. Should I say so in the templates? Yes. Update the confidentiality and HIPAA policy in Settings → Policies to reflect your actual setup — whether you have a BAA with your email provider, what the secure portal is, and how clients should reach you for clinical content. Clients notice when these details are specific and accurate.

The insurance policy placeholder still says [Psychology Today / practice website]. Where do I fix that? Settings → Policies → Insurance: in-network, out-of-network, and superbills. Replace the placeholder text with your actual profile URLs and update the accepted plans list.

Can I add a specific crisis line for established clients? Yes — and you should if you have one. Edit the crisis and after-hours policy in Settings → Policies and add your specific protocol (after-hours voicemail number, covering clinician contact, or hospital system's crisis line). Also add this to the intake scheduling confirmation template so established clients know their options before they ever need them.

A prospective client sent me detailed clinical information in their first message. What do I do? Reply through Yesoma using the first reply template, acknowledge that you received their message, and let them know that you will address their concerns in the intake session. Add a note to the case thread. Do not quote or repeat their clinical content back in email. Update your first reply template to include a note asking clients to keep initial messages brief — the playbook's default already includes this language, but you may want to make it more prominent.