CALPCC is pleased to offer a live webinar from Gabe Szczepanek, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ritten. We hope you will join us! Details below.

From Burden to Clinical Partner: AI's Real Role in Behavioral Health

AI in behavioral health is too often discussed in extremes: a futuristic replacement for clinicians, or a risky compliance liability. The reality is more practical, and considerably more powerful. In this session, Gabe Szczepanek, Co-Founder and CTO of Ritten, will walk attendees through how AI can move the EMR from a documentation burden to a true clinical partner — without compromising clinician control or clinical integrity.

The session opens with the macro problems facing the field, drawn from a national practitioner benchmarking survey conducted by Ritten in partnership with HMP. The data is clear: documentation consumes 55% of staff time, 41% of mental health workers report high burnout, and chronic reimbursement and billing pressures continue to drain revenue. The willingness to solve these problems already exists. Sixty-six percent of respondents are open to AI in their EMR, 55% want AI to suggest while a human approves, and 41% cite staff retention as their number-one priority.

Gabe will introduce a two-part framework for thinking about AI in clinical software: AI as automation, where repetitive toil that does not require clinical judgment becomes a single button click, and AI as partners, where intelligent agents see the data, take action in the system, and surface insights clinicians could not find on their own. Real Ritten features will illustrate each — Improve Text, AI Scribe, and Form Reviewer for automation; AI Treatment Plans, Data Studio, and AI Insights as partners — all clinician-controlled, HIPAA-compliant, transparent, and bounded by design.

The session closes with the Ritten AI Readiness Benchmark, a five-pillar self-assessment built from the survey data, and a candid conversation about where the field is heading and how organizations can position themselves to lead rather than react.

About the Presenter:

Gabe Szczepanek, Co-Founder & CTO

Gabe Szczepanek is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ritten, an AI-native EMR and revenue cycle platform purpose-built for behavioral health providers. With a background in biomedical engineering and experience modernizing legacy systems in government and fintech environments, Gabe specializes in transforming complex, highly regulated software ecosystems into modern, scalable platforms. At Ritten, he leads engineering and product architecture, overseeing the development of AI- driven tools that reduce documentation burden, improve compliance accuracy, and unlock operational insight across the behavioral health continuum of care.