The best template for an AI-drafted assessment report is one you've already written. Pick one finished report you're proud of, remove the identifiers, and start from it. Soma's draft then follows its structure: the same sections, in the same order, kept within the same length. You still review every section and sign it.
I didn't start out believing this. Early on, we assumed psychologists would want a clean, standard template to begin from. The psychologists I talked to kept telling me the opposite. They already had a structure. They'd spent years refining it. What they didn't have was time to fill it.
I'm not a clinician, so I won't tell you how your report should be organized. What I can share is what psychologists have told me about their own structure, and what we learned building software that follows it instead of replacing it.
Your structure already exists. It's sitting in a report you finished.
Why is a past report a better template than a blank one?
Because a blank template only knows the headings. A finished report knows everything around them.
A psychologist's finished report carries decisions a blank form never captures: which sections come first, which ones get a full page and which get a paragraph, where the background ends and the results begin, how the summary hands off to the recommendations. Those choices were made for good reasons, usually over many reports, and they're part of why a report reads as that clinician's work.
I've written before about why report templates don't solve the problem on their own. A template gives you the skeleton and leaves you to write everything else. A finished report gives a drafting tool the skeleton and the proportions, which turns out to matter almost as much.
What does a draft actually take from your report?
Here is what Soma follows today, stated as plainly as I can:
- Your sections. The draft uses the sections your report uses, with your headings.
- Your section order. If your summary comes before the detailed results, the draft puts it there too. In September we tightened this so drafts hold to the order of your past report, section by section.
- Your length. Each section is kept within the length of the matching section in your report. Your length works as a ceiling, so a two-paragraph background in your report doesn't come back as two pages.
- No repeated paragraphs. Also shipped in September: when the report is assembled, near-identical passages repeated across sections are removed, so the same paragraph doesn't appear in the background and again in the summary.
The content comes from the file you upload for the new case: the protocols, score reports, intake, school records and collateral. Your past report shapes the draft. The new file fills it.
Voice is the part people ask about most, and I'd rather let a clinician speak to that than claim it myself. A registered psychologist who uses Soma put it this way:
"The narrative reads so consistently with how I would write — a lot closer to my own voice."
I covered the voice question in more depth in will an AI-drafted report sound like me. This piece is about structure, which is the part I can describe precisely.
How do you choose which report to bring?
Pick the report you'd be happiest to have every future report resemble. A few things psychologists have told me they look for:
A typical case, not your hardest one. The report you choose sets the pattern. A report written around an unusual case may have sections you'd rarely use again.
The right assessment type. A psychoeducational report and a neuropsychological report are organized differently. If you write both, bring one of each, because each type deserves its own starting point.
A recent one. Most clinicians' structure drifts over the years. The report you wrote last spring probably reflects how you write now better than the one from five years ago.
Complete, with identifiers removed. Names, dates of birth, schools and other identifiers should come out before you upload anything. Soma also removes identifiers before any AI sees the text, and you review and approve those redactions.
If the report you pick doesn't work cleanly as a template, for example because its headings are inconsistent, the assistant can check it and help repair it before you use it.
In a clinic, each clinician's own reports can become their template.
What about a clinic with several clinicians?
This is where the idea scales in a way I didn't expect.
In a clinic, every clinician usually has their own structure, even when they share a letterhead. Forcing everyone onto one house template tends to mean everyone spends time rewriting the parts that don't match how they work.
So for clinics, we can build a template pack from each clinician's own finished reports. A psychologist hands over a few reports they're proud of, we build the templates from them, and those templates are what their drafts follow. We've built packs like this for psychoeducational, neuropsychological and letter work.
Clinics can also set shared templates and letterhead on the clinic page that apply to every member. A clinician's own template still takes priority over the shared one, so the person who writes the report keeps their structure.
What doesn't your past report do?
It doesn't make the clinical decisions. The draft follows your structure, but the interpretation, the conclusions and the recommendations are yours to write, change or remove. You approve the report section by section before anything is exported to Word.
It also can't fill a gap the file leaves open. If a document never arrived, the draft will show the same gap the file has. And if your past report has a section the new case doesn't need, you can remove it from the draft.
If you're comparing tools, this is one of the first things I'd test. It's near the top of what to demand from AI report writing: does the draft follow your report, or does it ask you to adopt someone else's?
Quick answers
What's the best template for AI report writing? One of your own finished reports. It already carries your sections, their order and their length.
Does the draft copy text from my past report? No. The structure comes from your past report. The content comes from the new case file.
Can I start from different reports for different assessment types? Yes. Psychoeducational and neuropsychological reports are usually organized differently, so it makes sense to bring one of each.
Can a clinic have templates built from its clinicians' reports? Yes. We build template packs from clinicians' own finished reports, and shared templates and letterhead can be set for the whole clinic.
Who signs the report? You do. Every section is reviewed and approved by you before it's exported.
Report writing already takes long enough. I wrote about why psychological report writing takes so long, and starting from your own structure is one of the simplest ways to stop rebuilding it every time.
If you'd like to see it on your own work, bring one of your past reports, identifiers removed, and we'll show you the draft it produces.
Thank you for the years you've put into getting your structure right. It deserves to be the starting point.
— Ian
