A new-patient psychiatric intake is the longest, densest piece of documentation most prescribers write. An hour of conversation has to become a chart that another clinician, a payer auditor, and a future version of you can all read and act on. General-purpose AI scribes do not handle this well. Most of them produce a clean four-paragraph summary that loses the structure psychiatry actually needs.
Nextvisit handles intakes differently. Aria listens for the structural cues a behavioral-health intake follows, history of presenting illness, past psychiatric history, family and social history, MSE, risk assessment, and treatment plan, and routes content into the right field as it hears it. The MSE does not end up paraphrased into the HPI. The risk assessment does not get compressed into a single sentence. Direct patient quotes are preserved when they matter clinically, with the patient and clinician speakers labeled.
The result is a draft that already looks like a psychiatric intake, not a primary-care SOAP note retrofitted to fit one. You still review and sign. You still own the clinical judgment. The work that gets removed is the structural reassembly.
What gets captured
Aria captures the things you would expect a psychiatrist to chart, and skips the things you would not.
Captured: chief complaint in the patient’s own words, full HPI with onset, course, modifying factors, and associated symptoms; psychiatric review of systems; past psychiatric history including hospitalizations, suicide attempts, and prior medication trials with response; family psychiatric history; social and developmental history relevant to the presentation; substance use including current and past; complete MSE; risk assessment with documented risk and protective factors; differential diagnosis with reasoning; treatment plan with medication choice, dosing, monitoring, and follow-up.
Not captured: small talk, scheduling logistics, side conversations, and anything the patient or clinician explicitly says is off the record.
Where direct quotes appear
Direct quotes appear in two places. First, in the chief complaint, where the patient’s exact framing of the problem matters. Second, anywhere the patient describes a symptom in language that would lose meaning in clinical paraphrase. A patient who says “it’s like the volume on everything got turned up” has said something specific about hyperarousal that “patient reports increased irritability” does not convey. The draft preserves both.
Risk assessment is its own field
Risk assessment is the section payers and risk managers read first. Aria treats it as a structured field, not a paragraph. Documented risk factors, protective factors, current ideation, plan, intent, means, and the clinical judgment that follows from those data points. The format matches how psychiatrists are trained to chart risk, so the field reads like the clinician wrote it directly.
What you still do
Sign the note. Own the clinical judgment. Edit anything that needs editing, and the system learns from your edits over time so the next draft needs less of them.
The point is not to remove you from the chart. It is to remove the hour of structural reassembly between the visit and the signed note.