How documentation works in Rivet

Rivet has three practitioner-authored note templates: a SOAP note, a DAP note, and a treatment plan. You open them from the same Templates dropdown as PHQ-9, GAD-7, or any clinical worksheet. They render inside the session, fill from the templates you’ve already used, and export by clipboard or PDF when you’re ready. One thing about them is different from every other template, and it’s the load-bearing fact of this section: your note never leaves your browser. It’s not sent to the client. It’s not written to a Rivet server. It’s not cached anywhere durable. When you close the session, the note is gone unless you exported it.

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The three templates

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SOAP note

Four sections — Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan. The clinical documentation format that originated in problem-oriented medical records and crossed over into mental-health practice. Common in psychiatry, hospital-based therapy, and any practice that grew up in a medically-flavoured chart.

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DAP note

Three sections — Data, Assessment, Plan. Collapses Subjective + Objective into one combined Data section. Common in psychology, counselling, and social-work practice where the Subjective/Objective split feels artificial. See SOAP vs DAP for the detailed comparison.

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Treatment plan

Six sections — Presenting concern, Treatment goals, Objectives, Planned interventions, Progress measures, Review schedule. Authored once at the start of treatment, then revisited at review points. Same practitioner-private posture as the session notes — you export it to your EHR when you’re done.

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What “practitioner-private” actually means

The note template runs separately from client-fillable templates. When you open it:

• Nothing is sent to your client’s device. Your client’s browser literally doesn’t know you’ve opened a note. There’s no overlay, no notification, no flicker on their side.
• No keystrokes are synced anywhere. Client-fillable templates send a snapshot of every keystroke so your live preview updates as the client types. Practitioner-private notes skip that path entirely — you’re typing into your own browser, so there’s nothing to sync.
• No durable cache. Client-fillable templates persist briefly so a reconnect after a network blip restores the in-progress responses. Practitioner-private notes never touch that cache. The content lives in your browser’s memory and nowhere else.
• Audit trail is metadata only. Rivet records that you opened a SOAP template at a given timestamp, in a given session, and whether you copied or downloaded it. The note content is not in that record.

There’s also a defensive guard on the client side: if a practitioner-private template ever reached the client by mistake, the client refuses to render it and logs the attempt. Belt-and-suspenders for a posture we don’t expect to break.

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Why this matters

Privacy. A 50-minute therapy session is among the most sensitive PHI surfaces in healthcare. Most AI-scribe products handle this by promising encryption-in-transit, encryption-at-rest, vendor BAA, and 24-hour retention. Rivet handles it by not having a session-content store at all. You can’t breach what doesn’t exist. Clarity. When you paste a note into Jane, Owl, or your paper chart, you know exactly what’s in it — because you authored it. There’s no “AI generated this part, then I edited it” provenance question. The chart entry is your clinical judgment, with the structured template-driven data (PHQ-9 score, SUDS curve, thought record) as supporting context that auto-filled where it fit. Control. The structured data is captured in the templates — scores, target IDs, SUDS readings, worksheet content. The note is your interpretation of that data. Rivet’s job is to put the structured data in your hands; your job is the formulation, the plan, the clinical voice. That’s the line we drew, and it’s the line you reinforce every time you author a note here.

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Where the note fits in the session flow

A practitioner-private note can be open at the same time as a client-fillable template. They live in parallel — the client sees the PHQ-9 overlay on their device, you see the SOAP note overlay on yours, and the two don’t bleed into each other. When you minimize the SOAP overlay to take a break, the in-progress text stays in browser memory. When you reopen it, the partial draft is still there. When the call ends, the in-progress text disappears unless you exported it first. The session-summary export — covered in Exporting notes — bundles your notes with every other completed template into a single PDF. Practitioner- authored notes lead the summary; screening + worksheet content follows as appendices. That ordering matches how clinical charts read: the practitioner’s note is the entry; the templates are evidence.

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