A template gives you the skeleton of a report — headings, section order, the scaffolding. It does not give you the writing. That's why clinicians who already have a strong template still lose 10 to 15 hours per report. The hours live in the synthesis and the prose, and a template can't touch that part.
I want to make the honest argument here, not the easy one. Templates are useful. Most of the psychologists I talk to already have one. The problem isn't that they're missing a tool — it's that the tool they have was never designed to do the hard part.
A template hands you an empty container to fill by hand.
Don't report templates already solve this?
They solve the structure, and that's real — but the structure was never where the hours went. When I sit with a clinician and walk through where the time actually goes, the template is already open. They're not staring at a blank page wondering what sections to include. They know.
What they're doing instead is reading through their findings, weighing them, and writing the narrative that ties it all together in their own clinical reasoning. That's the work. A template hands you an empty container — you still have to fill every inch of it by hand.
The scaffolding repeats; the writing on top does not.
Why does a template still leave hours of work?
Because a template standardizes the scaffolding, not the thinking-onto-the-page. Roughly 60 to 70% of a report's structure repeats from one to the next — the same sections, the same order, the same bones. A good template captures that beautifully.
But the clinicians I work with still rebuild that scaffolding by hand every single time, then pour the findings in on top, one paragraph at a time. The repeating 60 to 70% gives you a head start on layout. It gives you almost nothing on the writing, which is the part that takes 10 to 15 hours even with the template right there.
It's worth naming what that time costs. In a survey of 93 health-service psychologists, participants spent a median of around five hours a week on non-billable clinical work, and 51.6% described that administrative load as a significant source of work-related stress. A template doesn't move that number, because the load isn't structural — it's the writing. I dug into why report writing takes so long, and into the report-writing problem underneath all of it.
What's the difference between a template and a draft in your voice?
A template is an empty form you fill in. A draft in your voice is a report that's already written the way you would write it — assembled, narrated, ready for you to read, correct, and sign off. That's the difference between starting and finishing.
This is the distinction I care about most, because clinicians have told me plainly: they don't want a generic template that flattens their reasoning into someone else's house style. They want their voice — the way they phrase a recommendation, the way they sequence an interpretation, the clinical judgment that makes the report theirs.
A static template can't carry your voice. By design, it's the same for everyone who uses it. The goal — the only goal worth aiming at — is a report that reads like yours, not a generic template. The assembly done, the prose drafted, the judgment still entirely yours.
Are templates still worth using?
Yes — and I want to be clear about that, because I'm not here to knock a tool that genuinely helps. A template is a fine starting point. It keeps your sections consistent, it stops you forgetting a heading, and it gives a new clinician a sane place to begin. If a template works for you, keep it.
What I'd gently push back on is the idea that a better template is the answer to the time problem. You can refine a template for years and it will still be a container. It will never read your findings and write the connecting narrative, because that was never what a template was for. So use it — just don't expect it to give you your evenings back.
Moving from an empty form to a drafted report in your own voice.
What actually removes the hours?
What removes the hours is moving from structure to outcome — from an empty form to a drafted report in your own voice that you then refine. Not a faster way to fill the template. A way to skip the filling and land on a draft you're correcting instead of composing.
The way I think about it, the clinician's time should go where their expertise actually matters: reading the draft, sharpening the interpretation, catching the nuance, making the call. Not rebuilding the same scaffolding for the hundredth time and hand-typing prose into it.
That's the whole reason Soma exists — and it's why I draw such a hard line between a template and a draft. A template standardizes your starting point. The outcome we care about is you opening a report that already reads like yours, with the assembly handled and the judgment left where it belongs — with you. You can see how we frame that on our product page.
I'll say the honest version once more: templates are good, and you should keep the one that works. They just solve the part that was never the bottleneck. The 10 to 15 hours don't live in the structure — they live in the writing, and that's the part worth getting back. See how Soma drafts a report you review and sign.
Thank you for reading, and thank you to every clinician who's walked me through exactly where their hours go — it means a great deal, and it's shaped how we think about all of this.
— Ian
