AWS for Industries
Netsmart Transforms Behavioral Healthcare with New Feature of AWS HealthScribe
While clinical documentation is a fundamental component of patient care, healthcare providers increasingly find themselves spending more time on documentation rather than quality patient interaction. Amazon Web Services (AWS) HealthScribe, a HIPAA-eligible service, helps healthcare vendors build clinical applications that responsibly leverage generative AI to write preliminary clinical documentation.
Netsmart is a health information technology company that develops and delivers comprehensive software solutions for healthcare providers. They were an early customer of AWS HealthScribe and has worked closely with AWS to address the specific needs of their behavioral health provider clients. With the implementation of the GIRPP (Goal, Intervention, Response, Progress, Plan) template for behavioral health feature in AWS HealthScribe, Netsmart has announced Bells Virtual Scribe. This is a new behavioral health documentation capability in their CareFabric® platform.
Documentation Burden in Behavioral Health
In behavioral healthcare, clinicians and staff can spend up to 40 percent of their time (nearly two full days a week) on documentation rather than patient care. This administrative burden contributes significantly to provider burnout at a time when mental health services are in unprecedented demand.
Netsmart clients, who serve more than 140 million US residents as of 2025, care for individuals across the spectrum of behavioral health conditions. Providers working with individuals experiencing mental health challenges must monitor for crises or suicidal thoughts, while managing complex situations and overcoming communication difficulties. They need to differentiate between a patient’s symptoms and their actual concerns.
During these sessions, providers are required to document their interactions to track the patient’s journey and adhere to billing requirements. Netsmart recognized the need to innovate in this space on behalf of their clients.
“We have a responsibility to improve healthcare delivery at a broad scale,” explains Matthew Arnheiter, SVP of Innovations at Netsmart. “Our focus has always been on reducing the documentation burden for providers so they can spend more time with the individuals they serve.”
Targeting Reduced Documentation Time with the AWS HealthScribe Behavioral Health Template
Unlike physical health documentation, behavioral health follows a goal-centric model using GIRPP (more commonly known as GIRP) notes. Leveraging the new GIRP template for behavioral health feature on AWS HealthScribe, Netsmart developed a new specialized documentation solution for their clients. The GIRP template matches closely to what behavioral health providers are documenting about their session, which tends to be more open ended and narrative than general medicine notes.
The solution combines ambient listening technology with advanced natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) to generate draft clinical GIRP notes from therapy sessions. During appointments, the Netsmart Bells Virtual Scribe uses AWS HealthScribe to transcribe and summarize the provider and patient conversation in near real-time (shown in figure 1). This allows providers to maintain full engagement with their clients, instead of taking manual notes. AWS HealthScribe assists with creating documentation, but the provider maintains final authority by reviewing and approving all therapy session records (shown in figure 2).
“If we can take that two days of documentation time down to two hours, then we succeed in providing that time back to providers and the clients they serve,” notes Arnheiter.
Figure 1 – Screenshot of Netsmart Bells Virtual Scribe showcasing the use of AWS HealthScribe to generate GIRP notes. (No real patient data or protected health information (PHI) was used in this demonstration. For illustrative purposes only.)
Figure 2 – Provider documentation view of Netsmart Bells Virtual Scribe. (No real patient data or protected health information (PHI) was used in this demonstration. For illustrative purposes only.)
Impact of Generative AI on Behavioral Health
The Netsmart Bells Virtual Scribe solution aims to produce results for early adopters in reducing documentation time and enhancing the quality of therapy sessions.
“Our behavioral health provider clients have shared positive initial reactions, indicating that our solution supports accurate, comprehensive clinical documentation while targeting administrative burden. The GIRP notes have been capturing the pertinent parts of a therapy session including the goals of the individual, interventions to help achieve those goals and the progress in attaining them,” says Arnheiter.
Expanding AWS HealthScribe Capabilities to Improve Patient Care
“The combination between Netsmart and AWS has really allowed us to innovate faster,” explains Arnheiter. “Having all the data in one place, and the ability to add services like Amazon Bedrock, enables us to unlock information that exists inside our EHR [electric health record] systems and provide better tools to providers.”
The Netsmart roadmap includes expanding the capabilities of their AWS HealthScribe implementation. In addition, future enhancements to the CareFabric platform will focus on analyzing the vast amounts of unstructured data in behavioral health records to provide even more valuable insights to providers.
“Today, some individuals’ records contain hundreds of pages of information, with some clients seeing providers daily or weekly,” says Arnheiter. “The tools around augmented intelligence that AWS provides allow us to glean more insights from that data, provide different user experiences for providers, and ultimately drive innovation in ways that weren’t possible before.”
Netsmart exemplifies how cloud technology, and AI, can address critical challenges in healthcare delivery and achieve better outcomes for both providers and patients. To learn more about how you can reduce clinician workloads and improve the patient experience contact your AWS Representative.
Further Reading
- AWS Healthcare Blog – Stay updated on the latest AWS solutions and customer stories in healthcare
- How Contrast AI Is automating physician documentation with AWS HealthScribe – Learn how the output from AWS HealthScribe can be leveraged to alleviate administrative burdens.
- AWS Purpose-Built Healthcare Solutions – AWS has 6 services built specifically for healthcare and life sciences use cases—more than any other cloud provider. See how you can unlock the power of healthcare data with our purpose-built healthcare services.