STEPnotes™ was developed by Dr. Rhonda Sutton, a licensed professional counselor and a licensed professional counselor supervisor with over 27 years of experience in the mental health field. During her years as a novice counselor, Dr. Sutton found it challenging to determine what to include in her progress notes as well as how to efficiently document her therapy sessions. As a supervisor for counselors-in-training, she found that many of her supervisees shared these same struggles with documentation and often asked her how to take good progress notes. Given this need, Dr. Sutton developed STEPnotes™ so that counselors and counselors-in-training, as well as professional coaches, could have a more systematic and effective way of conceptualizing their work with their clients. The acronym, "STEP", streamlines the way in which mental health practitioners and coaches think about their sessions with clients by conceptualizing each session into four main "STEPs". In the online software program, checkboxes and sentence stems are associated with the various components of the "STEPs", but counselors also have the ability to note specific information associated with each STEP.
The original online e-tool was created in 2011, but since that time the STEPnotes™ team has revised and upgraded the system so that counselors have a simple manner in which to record their progress notes. Once the note is completed, the counselor saves the note either to his or her computer or prints it off for hard copy files. Try STEPnotes™ today and see why it is the way to note your client’s progress!