For Occupational Therapists ·
What you'll accomplish
By the end of this guide, you'll be able to dictate your session observations out loud immediately after a patient visit — Otter.ai transcribes everything in real time, and you'll have clean, editable text ready to paste into your EMR or feed into ChatGPT for note formatting. Most OTs who adopt this workflow eliminate 20–30 minutes of typing per day.
What you'll need
What you should see: The Otter app home screen with a large blue microphone button in the center.
Troubleshooting: If you don't receive the confirmation email, check your spam folder. Use a personal email rather than a work email if your organization's email system blocks new account notifications.
What you should see: A vocabulary list where you can add custom words. Otter will learn these immediately.
Immediately after your next patient session — while walking to your next room or at your desk — open Otter, tap the blue microphone button, and speak naturally:
"Patient is a 72-year-old male, three weeks post right total hip replacement. Today we worked on lower extremity dressing using a dressing stick and sock aid. He performed donning pants with minimal assistance, required moderate assist for shoe donning. Reported pain 3 out of 10 at the end of session. He's making good progress toward his goal of independent dressing with adaptive equipment. Plan to work on shoe donning technique next session."
Tap the microphone again to stop. The transcript appears in real time as you speak.
What you should see: A text transcript of everything you said, appearing word by word as you dictate. It should be 90–95% accurate after vocabulary training.
Most OTs find they spend 1–2 minutes cleaning a 3-minute dictation — still much faster than typing the whole note.
Troubleshooting: If the text copy feature doesn't work in your app version, tap and hold on the transcript text → Select All → Copy, then paste wherever you need.
Option A — Paste directly into EMR: If your EMR progress note fields accept free text, paste the cleaned transcript directly. Many OTs format it slightly by hand for the SOAP structure.
Option B — Run through ChatGPT: Copy the transcript → open ChatGPT → paste with this prompt: "Format this into a SOAP progress note for OT documentation: [paste transcript]." You'll get a fully structured SOAP note ready to copy into your EMR.
After transcribing with Otter, use these in ChatGPT to format your notes:
Basic SOAP note:
Format into SOAP progress note for OT. Setting: [outpatient/inpatient/school]. Insurance: [Medicare/commercial]. Transcript: [paste]
SNF Medicare note:
Format into a skilled therapy progress note meeting Medicare Part A requirements. Include skilled justification. Transcript: [paste]
School-based session note:
Format into a school OT session note. Include: student participation, skill demonstrated, assistance level, progress toward IEP goal [state goal]. Transcript: [paste]