114. The Free HIPAA-Compliant ChatGPT Almost No Therapist Knows About

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The Free HIPAA-Compliant ChatGPT Almost No Therapist Knows About

You’ve probably heard me say it a hundred times: never put client information into regular ChatGPT. That rule still stands, but there’s now a separate HIPAA-Compliant ChatGPT built specifically for clinicians, and almost nobody knows it exists yet.

In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I walk through exactly how I got verified with my NPI number in under three minutes, what I’m actually using it for day-to-day, and the one sneaky spot in the settings where it’s not compliant unless you go looking for it yourself.

AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:

  • How to verify with your NPI number and get into HIPAA-Compliant ChatGPT in just a few minutes, even if you’re not a doctor.
  • Why signing the BAA under Settings and Agreements is the one step that actually makes it HIPAA-compliant, not just the name.
  • Using it for progress notes, treatment plans, and denial appeal letters with real client PHI typed straight in.
  • Uploading your own custom skills for things like content creation, supervision prep, and client homework.
  • Where the built-in agents get risky the moment they try to leave the platform and post somewhere else.

Connect with me:

Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries:www.heyberries.com/therapists
Sponsored by Auralink Pro: Start your free trial and use code KYMTOLSON for 20% off www.auralink.com/pro

Transcript:

[00:00:05] Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of “Run Your Private Practice with AI.” so you know how I’m always in your ear saying, “Never, ever, ever put client information into regular ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity”? Never do that, right? We, talk about that ad nauseam inside of my free Facebook group, “Run Your Private Practice with AI,” Clinical AI Club, constantly saying, “Never do that,” right?

[00:00:29] So that rule does still stand, but here’s the thing. There’s now a whole separate ChatGPT built just for clinicians, and it’s HIPAA compliant. I know. Mic drop, right? Everybody’s, like, freaking out about this. And nobody knows about it, which is super interesting, and it’s free, which is pretty good for therapists that are already watching their budgets, right?

[00:00:54] So, I verified my account with my NPI number, and I was inside in, like, three minutes. It was super easy to do. So today, I just wanna walk you through exactly how to get in, what I’d actually use it for, and the one sneaky place where it’s not compliant, so you don’t wanna get yourself in trouble

[00:01:13] So if you just go and google ChatGPT for clinicians, pull it up on your browser, you’re gonna be brought to a screen. And this came up in the Facebook group. Somebody was like, “I thought that was just for doctors.” You know, and it’s actually not. It’s for any clinician that has an NPI number. So the first thing you’re gonna do is go to that screen and click verify, I think is what it says.

[00:01:36] Verify with ChatGPT for clinicians. So you click it and you go in and then it asks for your NPI number, which is super easy, right? You just put in your NPI number and once you put it in there, it says, “Okay, thank you.” And about, I think it was like a minute or two later, the little wheel spun and it came back and says, “You’ve been verified.”

[00:01:56] And then it gave me access to ChatGPT. So once I got access to it, it asked me to like sign into it. So make sure that you sign in, like if you have another ChatGPT, make sure you sign in with the same username, email, however you do it, because you wanna have it within the same account essentially, and I’ll explain that in a minute.

[00:02:18] But I just do that for like ease sake. Like it’s easier just to have it all under the same email address. Now if you wanted to, you could use like a business address separately if your other one’s personal. You could do that. It’s just I get confused. Like I’ll be like, “Oh my God, what did I sign in with?”

[00:02:33] So I try to keep things like that super consistent. Like every one of my AI signs under my Gmail, not like my personal info@kimtolson.com email address. It’s just like a naming convention consistency that I’ve used to just keep track of everything, ’cause it can get super overwhelming having all these accounts everywhere.

[00:02:52] So I would recommend that. But once you do it, it’s going to like route you into the system, and if you use the same email address, this part’s a little bit tricky and you know, I wish I could share my screen with you guys, but I know this is voice. So once you go in there, right down under the settings in ChatGPT, you’ll see like your regular ChatGPT name.

[00:03:13] If you click that, once you open it, you will see that there is now ChatGPT for clinicians inside of that. So it’s literally a separate interface that you have to go into to make sure you’re in ChatGPT for clinicians

[00:03:26] Now, when you’re in there, it’s pretty amazing to me that they’re offering this for free and it’s HIPAA compliant. But we all think HIPAA compliant, right? But a lot of times we don’t think about, like, the BAA that comes with that. That’s the business associates agreement. And if you don’t sign a BAA, it’s not really HIPAA compliant yet.

[00:03:44] So one little tricky thing that they do in there, once you get logged in under that HIPAA compliant account, you don’t really realize it until you go, like, snooping around.

[00:03:54] So once you’re in ChatGPT for clinicians, you’ll go down to the bottom left-hand screen again, and you’re gonna see where you can go to Settings. And then under Settings, you go to Agreements. And then mine’s already signed, but you’ll see where it says Sign BAA. So you have to literally like, check the box, turn it on so the BAA is signed.

[00:04:17] So mine says it was signed on June 21st, 2026 at 5:50 AM. I don’t know what I was doing up at 5:50 AM, but that’s what I did. So once you do that, it’s, good to go. You’ve got that signed in, okay? After that, there’s so many things you can do with it. It’s pretty amazing. So if you are in my Thera AI Hub, right? You’ve got a library of custom GPTs that I’ve shared with you over there. I don’t know how long they’re gonna be available because ChatGPT just shut down the ability to make new custom GPTs unless you’re on a business account, and I think I just heard that they’re not gonna allow you to share them anymore.

[00:04:55] So I don’t know what’s gonna happen with that. But if you’re using GPTs or you’re in the Thera AI Hub, you could literally, like, click through from mine, click through, and go in and use a GPT inside of here. So why does that matter? It matters if you wanna use a GPT. For example, I’ve got one inside of the Thera AI Hub that, like, does treatment plans, right?

[00:05:16] Now, before, if you were to use something like ChatGPT, you would have to, totally de-identify. It would just have to be like, “Give me a treatment plan for somebody with anxiety disorder.” But now you could literally, like, dictate something about your client if you wanted to, all the PHI in the world if you wanted to, to make it super specific and use my treatment plan GPT to turn it into a treatment plan.

[00:05:39] Or just talk to the chat box after you dictate and say, “I wanna turn this into a treatment plan.” I don’t know how perfect it’s gonna be, but it’s probably not bad. I’m guessing it’s not bad. But the whole point is you can put your own PHI in here, and you don’t have to worry about that anymore, which is pretty cool.

[00:05:56] So other things you could do in here, of course, you could dictate a session with a client and have it write a progress note for you. You could copy the progress note, go put it over into your EHR if you wanted to. Now, the only thing I’m finding with this, and you guys know I’m the clinical consultant for Berries, which is a HIPAA-compliant AI note-taker, scribe, and treatment plan writer, and a million other things.

[00:06:21] There’s an assistant in there that basically, you can consult with through the whole case to help make you a better clinician, all that stuff, and there’s a lot more coming. It’s gonna be a full EMR where you can store client records you know, schedule, all of that stuff. So this is good. ChatGPT for clinicians is good for just kinda one-off thing, in my opinion, like a progress note, a treatment plan.

[00:06:43] It’s not gonna keep a full client record for you here. Like, this isn’t gonna replace an EMR in my opinion. I mean, who knows what might come down the road? But it’s a good– it’s good to know that you can go in here, use ChatGPT, and really just be able to talk to it however you want to and not have to worry about PHI at all.

[00:07:02] You could s- like, if you’re stuck on a case, you could just chit-chat with it and say, “You know, this is what happened in my case today. Can you give me some feedback about that?” Like, it can act as sort of like a feedback mechanism for you too. But it’s just the organization of it is not great. Like, it’s not something where really you can keep client charts as far as I can tell.

[00:07:22] Unless you just wanted to keep little chat threads for it and, and maybe you do. Maybe you wanna try it that way. The other thing you can do in here, so if you are in the Thera AI Hub, you have access to over 40, 42 custom skills that I built out for you guys that are clinician facing skills. There’s everything from blogs, newsletters I mean, anything, social media content creation ads.

[00:07:46] Marketing, scaling your business, how to start a private practice, how to start a group practice, how to start a group therapy program. There’s so much in there already, but they’re all in these little customized packages called skills.

[00:08:00] So what’s really cool about this is ChatGPT for clinicians even allows you to add your custom skills here now. So if you go to– if you log into ChatGPT for clinicians and you go under plugins, and then from plugins you go up to skills and click add a skill. If you’re in the Thera AI Hub, you could just upload the skills I’ve already pre-built for you that are awesome.

[00:08:23] Very comprehensive for what you’re trying to do. Plug it in over here. And the neat thing about it is, you know, like let’s say that you had… N- not that we wanna share client stories in our newsletters or something like that, but let’s say you just wanted to dictate to ChatGPT, and you had the newsletter skill already installed over here.

[00:08:39] You could just be like, “Yeah, I had this client today that did ba, ba, ba, ba, ba,” and, you know, just go on and on about what happened in the session. You could totally do that. You could say, “Now look, I want you to take this content and I want you to write a blog post that would be helpful for somebody in this situation,” or, “I want you to put together a newsletter that could help people that have these particular issues going on.”

[00:09:02] Obviously, I want it to be de-identified, but if you just kind of blurb out a client session, that is perfect content for marketing, as long as the client can’t read it and be like, “Oh my God, she’s talking about me.” And you can do all of that inside of this HIPAA-compliant environment, plugging in those skills which are already like custom-made for you as a clinician to be able to use, and you can use them inside of this HIPAA-compliant environment, which I think is just awesome.

[00:09:28] So Other things denial appeal letters, right? Like let’s say that you get a denial letter from an insurance company and you’re like, “This is bullshit,” right? And you want to draft a really great denial like appeal letter based on this client’s particular information. You could technically go to your EHR, download the client’s chart, upload it over here and say, “I want you to look through this whole chart and help me draft an appeal letter for this denial,” and upload the denial letter.

[00:09:59] Like you could totally do that and have it in a HIPAA compliant environment and ChatGPT’s gonna do a great job with that. It’s gonna scan the whole case, come back and give you a really great letter to send to the insurance companies. Supervision prep, right? If like one of your supervisees has given you, you know, like, like you’ve got their notes from the last two weeks or something, right?

[00:10:20] Pop their notes in here and say, “Look, I’m getting ready to meet with this clinician, my supervisee. I want you to go through like all these notes that they wrote, find errors, find teaching moments,” something like that. just say it to ChatGPT and it’ll find that for you and then you’ll be totally prepared for your supervision sessions before the client comes in.

[00:10:40] You could dictate what happened with the client. You could say, “Look, I want you to now turn this into, like a really awesome homework assignment that would help this client specifically, but I want you to make it into a really pretty PDF.” Like ChatGPT can do that for you really easily, so you could have it do that as well

[00:10:57] Now, the thing I wanna talk about with this that’s super interesting to me is there are agents in here, and not everyone’s using agents. I’m using a ton of agents and I’m skill stacking, right? So all those skills I talked about in the Thera AI hub, I stack them with agents, right? So I’ll be like I need a blog post, and then I want the content multiplier to turn it into like 50 different pieces of content.

[00:11:21] And then I want you to use the Canva creator skill that I made, and I want you to go over to Canva and make carousels of the things that should be carousels. Have all that ready. Then I want you to go to BlueTato, and I want you to, schedule all this stuff to go live on my Instagram. and also you could tell the agent, “And I also want you to go to my WordPress and upload the blog post.”

[00:11:42] Like, you could totally have an agent do all of that for you. Now, ChatGPT has got these agents in the clinicians, the hub for clinicians, which I just, I’m not sure about because in my research What I discovered was, like you could have this agent go out and do stuff for you, but if there’s PHI in there, the link between where you go– So let’s say you wanted to use the agent to go to your HIPAA-compliant Google Workspace and answer client emails that are coming in for you, right?

[00:12:15] It could do that. It could totally do that. It’s HIPAA compliant. But what my research is showing me, that moment between where it leaves the ChatGPT for clinicians and then comes out and goes over to your HIPAA-compliant Google Workspace, that gap in there is not HIPAA compliant, or you can’t ensure that it’s HIPAA compliant.

[00:12:35] And that’s, that’s just based on my research. If anybody wanted to do anything like that, Samantha Schalk, she’s great. She did a HIPAA webinar for my listeners recently. She’s somebody you could go talk to about that to get more information about it. So I would definitely check with a HIPAA compliance officer before you do something like that.

[00:12:55] Now, you could use the agents inside of the platform where you do like a stacking like I just talked about, but instead of having it leave the environment and go post for you, you could just have it give you the output there, but like a multi-scale agent where it could just run a whole thing for you. You can schedule these.

[00:13:11] You could tell it to run once a week. So you can do all of that in this HIPAA-compliant environment, and you can use PHI in this environment. You just don’t want the agent to go out and do other things for you, if that makes sense. Now hypothetically, I shared about this in the meeting the other week.

[00:13:26] I use Perplexity’s Comet browser. I’m on the paid tier that is HIPAA compliant and SOC 2 level security. So in my mind, you know, I still need to check this out myself. I’ve not done it yet, but I could technically use this HIPAA-compliant ChatGPT for clinicians, build an agent that uses my browser that’s HIPAA compliant, and then goes to another HIPAA-compliant environment like my EHR or something like that, or you know, to post a blog post or something like that because my browser is HIPAA compliant too.

[00:13:58] So, you know, I’m not gonna swear by that, but I’m just like putting ideas out there to let you guys know that these agents are in here, but you just have to be careful with how you’re using them, ’cause I don’t even know like all the information about like the in-between and if that then becomes a HIPAA breach.

[00:14:14] So I just wanna put that out there. There’s all kinds of stuff in here it can do for you. It really is pretty amazing. You can make projects just like you can in Claude, where you set up a project. It’s got knowledge files about… I mean, technically, I guess you could do a, a client. You could make a client a project in here, and you could just name it the client’s name and everything, and keep information in there about that client if you wanted to.

[00:14:36] I don’t know how messy it would get, ’cause ChatGPT, I don’t know about you, but once I start using it, it’s, like, impossible to find anything. So I’d be careful about that.

[00:14:45] So anyway, I wanted to tell you guys about here. It’s HIPAA compliant, it’s free. You can sign up with your NPI. There– That’s a myth that it’s only for doctors. A couple people said that to me, and I’m like: No, I signed up for it fine. You can use it. You can use custom GPTs in there. You can use agents.

[00:15:01] You can use skills. If you’ve got access to skills that you’ve been using in other AIs, you can download them and bring them over here. You can schedule tasks to run. So if you wanted it to make a social media, social media content or something based on the clients you saw that week, not their information, but just like themes, you could totally do that.

[00:15:19] The possibilities are kinda endless in here, and I think it’s really interesting, and I wanted to share that with you guys. So if you have any questions, let me know. And if you want the skills that I mentioned already built and ready to drop into ChatGPT for clinicians, they’re waiting for you in the Thera AI Hub. Come play with them. Come see what your notes and appeals could look like on autopilot. We are closing the doors on the Thera AI Hub on September 1st, I think is the, is the last day that the doors are gonna be open to join. We are restructuring. I’m merging the two. I’m merging the Clinical AI Club and the Thera AI Hub into one product. For a long time– The Clinical AI Club has been around for almost four and a half years now, ever since ChatGPT came out.

[00:16:05] And it’s kind of become a little bit obsolete at this point because AI happens and changes so fast, and the Thera AI Hub is more up to date with skills, things you can actually use and take with you into your AIs that you’re using and have, like, real results really fast. So we’re merging the Clinical AI Club and Thera AI Hub together.

[00:16:25] So if you’re listening to this and you’re a member of one or the other, you’re gonna be getting an email, you’re gonna be grandfathered into both. If you’re already in both, you’ve got a great deal right now. Once the doors reopen, the price is gonna be higher because we’re gonna be adding a lot of really cool bonuses.

[00:16:40] So if you’re listening to this, get in before the doors close. I would highly recommend it. Okay. have a great rest of your week, and I’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.