Technology-assisted formulation can help clinicians refine their clinical reasoning
Complex clients demand complex thinking — yet in busy clinical practice, deep formulation is often the first thing that gets dropped. In this webinar, Dr Chris Ludlow (Swinburne University) explores how technology-assisted formulation can help clinicians refine their clinical reasoning. The benefits of a formal process for formulating clients with this process is explored, and contrasted with traditional narrative notes.
🇦🇺 Tuesday 23 June, 10am AEST
🇺🇸 Monday 22 June, 5pm PT / 8pm ET
From Mind Maps, Venn diagrams and CBT maintenance cycles, clinicians are used to visualising client difficulties. This webinar will help clinicians enhance their visualisations skills using technology, helping clarify clinical reasoning and create compelling ways to share formulations with clients and colleagues.
Alternatives to using writing with paper and pencil to develop a formulation will be explored. The pitfalls of technology enabled documentation (AI Scribes) on our capacity for deep and personal formulations will be examined.
By the end of this session, you will understand how NovoNote can fit into your clinical workflow from session to final documentation, including:
Explain the core limitations of narrative-style clinical formulations and why these limitations matter for treatment planning and clinical communication.
Describe the theoretical basis for treating psychological formulation as causal reasoning — understanding how clinicians construct causal models of client difficulties, and why making that reasoning visible has clinical value.
Identify at least three clinical contexts in which formulation diagrams (e.g., CBT maintenance cycles, chain analyses, family dynamics) can enhance therapeutic processes, including shared formulation with clients.
Use AI tools such as Just Ask NovoNote for generating formulation diagrams from session notes, including how to review, modify, and apply AI-generated diagrams in clinical practice.
Critically evaluate the limitations and ethical considerations of AI-assisted formulation, including the importance of clinician oversight and the difference between computational structuring and clinical judgement
Dr Chris Ludlow is a Lecturer in Psychology at Swinburne University of Technology and Deputy Director of the Swinburne Psychology Clinic. He is a clinical psychologist with over 20 years’ experience in child and adolescent mental health, having worked across services including the National Health Service, Anna Freud Centre, and Queensland Children’s Hospital.
His work focuses on cognitive behaviour therapy, clinical reasoning, and the use of AI to enhance psychological formulation.
Dr Ben Buchanan is a psychologist and co-founder of NovoPsych, a software platform designed to help mental health services use psychometric science to improve patient outcomes.
He is a strong advocate for routine outcome monitoring and emphasises that its central mission is to serve people – both clinicians and patients. Through his university lecturing and clinical supervision, he helps ground the next generation of psychologists in the scientist-practitioner model.
Dr Buchanan is also a researcher in treatment effectiveness and a leader in helping mental health services collect their own practice-based evidence.
