Beginner's Guide to Using AI in Behavioral Health: Advice from Lightfully

E/M coding continues to evolve, and 2026 brings additional changes that behavioral health providers must understand. This guide covers the latest updates to medical decision-making levels, time-based billing criteria, and documentation requirements.

How AI Helped Lightfully Behavioral Health Improve Care and Efficiency

At Lightfully Behavioral Health, our mission is to provide high-quality, primary mental health care with compassion and measurable outcomes. Like many behavioral health organizations, we were facing a familiar tension: how do we maintain excellent clinical quality and compliance while also protecting our teams from burnout and operational overload?

Over the past year, thoughtfully introducing AI into our workflows has helped us answer that question in a very practical way.

What AI Means in Behavioral Health

In our context, AI isn’t a futuristic replacement for clinicians. It’s simply software that analyzes data and automates repetitive, rules-based tasks.

In behavioral health, that can mean:

• Reviewing documentation for completeness and consistency
• Supporting chart audits and compliance reviews
• Surfacing trends in documentation quality

We already rely on technology every day in our personal lives; AI is just another tool in that toolbox. The goal is not to change how we care for clients, but to remove friction so clinicians can spend more time doing the work that matters most.

The Problem We Needed to Solve: Manual Chart Audits

Before AI, our chart auditing process at Lightfully was:

• Manual and spreadsheet-driven
• Time-consuming and logistically complex
• Difficult to scale as we grew

I was personally spending nearly 20 hours per week just coordinating chart audits—collecting data, tracking reviews, and following up on issues. Even with that investment, we could only review 1–3 charts per site per month. We knew this wasn’t sustainable, especially as we expanded services for adults and teens across levels of care.

Chart audits were clearly essential for quality and compliance, but the way we were doing them was holding us back.

Partnering with Brellium: Bringing AI Into the Process

We chose to partner with Brellium, an AI-powered compliance solution built for behavioral health. Brellium focuses on helping clinics:

• Protect against insurance clawbacks
• Align documentation with payer and internal standards
• Automate and standardize session note auditing

Instead of relying on manual spot checks, Brellium allows us to:

• Audit every chart across the organization, not just a sample
• Flag missing or inconsistent documentation in real time
• Align reviews with our own clinical and payer requirements

What used to take our clinical directors and program managers 8+ hours a week now takes 1–2 hours. For me, the 20 hours a week I spent managing audit logistics has been reduced to just a few hours reviewing results.

Just as importantly, we’ve been able to remove chart review responsibilities from our therapists’ plates so they can focus on direct clinical care.

From Reactive Spot Checks to Proactive Quality Assurance

The shift with AI has been more than just time savings:

• Breadth of review: We moved from auditing a handful of charts per site to having visibility across every chart in the organization.
• Proactive quality: Instead of discovering issues weeks or months later, we can identify documentation gaps quickly and provide real-time feedback.
• Targeted coaching: Trends in the data help us understand where teams need support, so our leaders can focus on meaningful coaching rather than chasing paperwork.

AI didn’t change our standards—it gave us the capacity to uphold them consistently as we grow.

Change Management: Bringing the Team Along

Introducing AI into behavioral health requires as much attention to people and culture as it does to technology.

Here’s what helped us:

1. Start with a clear, concrete problem.

For us, it was the unsustainable burden of manual chart audits. We weren’t adopting AI for its own sake; we were solving a specific operational pain point.

1. Frame AI as a supportive tool, not a threat.

The term "AI" can feel intimidating. We emphasized that this is a software tool designed to support clinicians, not replace them. Our message: AI handles the tedious administrative work so people can focus on clinical care.

1. Pilot first, then scale.

We started with a subset of charts and sites, tested Brellium in our real workflows, and refined our approach before rolling it out more broadly.

1. Listen to leaders and staff.

I regularly ask our leaders, "What’s slowing you down? How can I make this easier?" Our decision to adopt Brellium came directly from these conversations about scalability and quality.

1. Invest in communication and training.

We were explicit about why we were making this change, what it would and would not do, and how it would benefit teams. As people saw the time savings and ease of use, skepticism decreased.

Addressing Common Concerns About AI

One of the most common questions we hear is: "Will AI take over my job?"

At Lightfully, the answer has been clear: no.

Instead, AI has allowed us to:

• Reduce time spent on administrative tasks
• Free up leaders to mentor and support staff
• Give therapists more protected time for client care

AI is not making clinical decisions or replacing therapeutic relationships. It’s helping ensure that the documentation and compliance infrastructure around that care is strong, efficient, and scalable.

Looking Ahead: The Future of AI in Behavioral Health

AI tools like Brellium are evolving quickly. Since we started, we’ve already seen new features that:

• Improve how we analyze documentation trends
• Enhance our ability to make data-informed decisions
• Support more nuanced quality and compliance workflows

For organizations like ours, the opportunity is to:

• Stay flexible and open to iteration
• Partner with vendors who understand behavioral health
• Use AI not just to fix today’s bottlenecks, but to prepare for tomorrow’s growth

Takeaways for Clinics Considering AI

If you’re exploring AI for your behavioral health organization, here are a few practical starting points:

• Identify one high-friction, high-volume process (like chart audits) where automation could have a clear impact.
• Pilot a tool with a small group and a defined scope before scaling.
• Communicate clearly that AI is there to support clinicians, not replace them.
• Use the time you save to reinvest in supervision, coaching, and direct client care.

In behavioral health, time is one of our most precious resources. By thoughtfully applying AI to the administrative and compliance work that surrounds care, we can give more of that time back to clinicians and clients.

Our experience at Lightfully has shown that, with the right tools and mindset, AI can be a powerful ally in delivering high-quality, compassionate, and sustainable mental health care.