2 THE SEVERE AND PERSI STENT MENTAL ILLNESS PROGRESS NOTES PLAN NER book, the date, time, and length of a session; those present within the session; the p rovider; provider's credentials' and a signature must be entered in the client's record. A FINAL NOTE ABOUT P ROGRESS NOTES AND HI PAA Federal regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Account ability Act (HIPAA) govern the privacy of a client's psychotherapy notes, as well as other protected health information (PHI). PHI and psychotherapy notes must be kept secure, and the client must sign a specific authorization to release this confidential information to anyone beyond the client's therapist o r treatment team. Further, psychotherapy notes receive other special treatment under HIPAA; for example, they may not be altered after they are initially drafted. Instead, the clinician must create and file formal amendments to the notes if he or she wishe s to expand, delete, or otherwise change them. Our Thera Scribe software provides functionality to help clinicians maintain the proper rules concerning handling PHI, by giving the ability to lock progress notes once they are created, to acknowledge patient consent for the release of PHI, and to track amendments to psychotherapy notes over time. Does the information contained in this book, when entered into a client's record as a progress note, qualify as a “psychotherapy note” and therefore merit confident ial protection under HIPAA regulations? If the progress note that is created by selecting sentences from the database contained in this book is kept in a location sepa rate from the client's PHI data, then the note could qualify as psychotherapy note data that is more protected than general PHI. However, because the sentences contained in this book convey generic information regarding the client's progress, the clinician may decide to keep the notes mixed in with the client's PHI and not consider it psycho-therapy note data. In short, how you treat the information (separated from or integrated with PHI) can determine if this progress note planner data is psychotherapy note information. If you modify or edit these generic sentences to reflect more personal in formation about the client or you add sentences that contain confidential information, the argument for keeping these notes separate from PHI and treating them as psy chotherapy notes becomes stronger. For some therapists, our sentences alone reflect enoug h per sonal information to qualify as psychotherapy notes, and they will keep these notes separate from the client's PHI and require specific authorization from the client to share them with a clearly identified recipient for a clearly identified purpose. 