What that lost policy is really costing you..

TL;DR - Somewhere in your practice is a policy you already wrote and already approved, one you'd still struggle to find fast when someone actually needs it. In this conversation, Mike and I talk about what we're calling the findability tax*, the invisible cost every practice pays when information technically exists but stays out of reach, and what it took to build a system that gets rid of it.*

Hi everyone,

Somewhere in your practice there's a policy you already wrote and already approved, one you'd still struggle to lay hands on in under a minute when someone actually needs it, because finding it means digging through a manual built for compliance instead of speed, hoping you've landed on the current version rather than an old one.

In this conversation, Mike told me about four people on his boat who spent the better part of an hour arguing over which safety vest to wear, chasing down a policy that already existed.

Four salaries burned on a problem that was never really about the vest.

That's the tax worth naming: a cost no invoice ever itemizes, yet every practice running on written policy pays it constantly. Call it the findability tax, the cost of information that exists somewhere in your system without existing anywhere your team can actually reach it in time to use it.

Searchable and scannable get taxed at different rates

Most systems are searchable. Type a word and you'll get every place it appears, which sounds like an answer until you're staring at a hundred documents that all happen to mention the same term, a second job disguised as access. Scannable is narrower and harder to build, ask the real question in your own words and get pointed straight at the one thing that answers it.

We spent months building exactly that at Awkward Recovery, a system that behaves less like a search bar and more like a librarian who already knows where everything lives.

The newest people on your team pay the highest rate

Someone who's been in this field for years can rephrase a bad search three or four times until something useful turns up. A brand new hire doesn't have that vocabulary yet, so the exact words they'd need to find the right answer are the words they haven't learned.

A system that only rewards knowing the right terminology quietly taxes the people who can least afford it, right when they need the most help.

The audit nobody scheduled

Once you can actually see your own system instead of hunting through it, patterns start surfacing that nobody went looking for, which clinicians tend to be the strongest fit for which clients, where two policies have quietly been contradicting each other for years. None of it was ever the goal, simply what becomes visible once finding an answer stops costing an hour.

Where in your practice is a good answer sitting somewhere, technically documented and functionally unreachable, and what has that actually cost you?

-Rachel

Mike and I get into the rest of this, including the story he still hasn't finished telling me about pitching a version of this system to the Merchant Mariner company he works for, in the full conversation.

New episodes drop every week.

My Reads of the Week

Physician EHR time and visit volume following adoption of team-based documentation support A national study of over 18,000 physicians published in JAMA Internal Medicine in October 2024 found that documentation time barely moved for most doctors who added team-based support, unless someone else was actually authoring the bulk of the note. Physicians with more than 40 percent of their notes written by another team member saw documentation time drop by over 70 minutes a week, while everyone else saw almost nothing. A clean reminder that fixing documentation burden has less to do with adding more hands and more to do with restructuring who actually touches the information.

How much time does the workforce spend searching for information in the "new normal Presented at iConference 2024, this study surveyed over 700 employees across four government offices and found that nearly a quarter of them were spending roughly half a workday every week just searching for information they needed to do their jobs. The paper draws a direct line between long search times and a measurable decline in information management quality, a formal way of saying the same thing every practice owner already suspects: the hours nobody tracks are still hours.

Retrieval-augmented generation and large language models for enterprise knowledge management and document automation: a systematic literature review Published in Applied Sciences in December 2025, this review of 63 studies on AI-powered document retrieval found that fine-tuned, domain-specific systems consistently outperform generic ones by 10 to 20 percent, and that most implementations still fail to measure whether they actually changed how people work. A useful reality check on the gap between an AI system that looks impressive in a demo and one that's actually been built around how your team searches.

Wisdom Nugget

Half the difficulty in finding the right counselor is not knowing what to search for in the first place, LCDC, LPC, LPC-S, LCSW, LMFT read like an alphabet soup until someone actually decodes what each credential means and who it's built for. The same problem shows up anywhere information lives behind a label nobody explained. The fix isn't more documents, it's someone willing to translate the vocabulary before asking anyone to search it.

Read more

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The essence of our mission at Atomic Souls transcends the realms of recovery and stability; it's about igniting the flame of purpose and passion within each soul we encounter. Join us.

Thanks for reading,

Rachel

p.s. If this is our first introduction, hi, I’m Rachel, founder and CEO of Atomic Souls Counseling. I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor (LPC-S) and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor (LCDC). After years in the trenches as a clinician, I discovered that my real passion isn’t just helping clients heal; it’s helping therapists thrive.

I’ve built Atomic Souls into more than a counseling practice; it’s a place where healing and business intelligence meet. I work with therapists, counselors, and practice owners to help them build sustainable, ethical, and profitable practices. Together, we focus on strategy, systems, and the economics of growth the behind-the-scenes work that allows you to keep showing up fully for your clients without burning out.

My approach blends clinical wisdom with business strategy. I coach on everything from pricing models and team structure to marketing, leadership, and scaling, all while maintaining your integrity and purpose. I believe you can be both a gifted clinician and a confident entrepreneur; those two identities don’t have to compete.

Through Atomic Souls, I’ve built a community where mental health professionals support one another, share resources, and turn purpose into sustainable success. Whether you’re just starting out or ready to expand, I’m here to help you build a practice that aligns with your values and fuels your life, not drains it.

If you’re a therapist ready to step into the next chapter of your career with clarity and confidence, let’s connect.

I write about the business of healing: strategy, systems, and soul for therapists who want to build thriving, values-driven practices on my blog.

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