Practice Management on Embodia - Part 1: Charting - Creating chart items

Chart items are the basic building blocks of a patient chart. Each patient chart will be comprised of a collection of chart items.

While Embodia provides a collection of chart items for you to use, you can create your own; you can create a private chart item that only you can use, or if you are the clinic manager, you can create chart items that anyone in your clinic can use.

You can also use Embodia's pre-built chart items as outlined in the help article, Using pre-built chart items. 

Best practices

We recommend keeping your chart items small, with just a few questions that fit together and can be reused in most scenarios. 
 
Once you've created your chart items, you can use the Template feature (described in more detail in the help article, Creating templates) to group together chart items into templates you frequently use. 
 
This way you can create many templates from the same chart items without having to rebuild the questions from scratch or rely on having duplicate information.

This might take a bit of planning upfront, but will save time in the long run as updating your chart items would be much quicker: If you want to edit a question in the future, you would only need to edit it in one location as opposed to going into each duplicated chart item to edit the question. Let's look at an example comparing the not recommended and recommended approaches:

Not recommended approach:

Creating 2 chart items:

• Chart item 1, called "Vitals with body chart", that has the following questions:
  • Heart rate;
  • Blood pressure;
  • Body temperature;
  • Body chart to annotate pain region.

• Chart item 2, called "Vitals with SOAP notes", that has the following questions:
  
  • Heart rate;
  • Blood pressure;
  • Body temperature;
  • SOAP Notes.

Recommended approach

The chart items created in the "Not recommended" approach include some duplication. So a better approach would be to extract the duplicate information into their own (smaller) chart item and end up with 3 chart items:

• Chart item 1, called "Vitals", that has the following questions:
  • Heart rate;
  • Blood pressure;
  • Body temperature.

• Chart item 2, called "Body chart", that has the following question:
  • Body chart to annotate pain region.

• Chart item 3, called "SOAP notes", that has the following question:
  • SOAP Notes.

This way, if you want to make an update to a question in the "Vitals" chart entry, or want to add a question to it (such as asking for the "Respiratory rate"), you only need to make that change in one location.

Note: If you are signed in as the clinic manager, you will have the option to create chart items "For the clinic account" that can be accessed by anyone who is part of your clinic, or "For my personal account" that will be private to you. If you are not the clinic manager, you can only create chart items for your personal account.

To create a chart item, click on Charting settings under the Charting tab in the top bar (or click on the Settings tab in the top nav bar, and then on Chart items under the Charting settings section). On the Chart items page, click on New chart item.

Building the chart item

After clicking on New chart item, fill out the form with the name of the chart item (the name of the item can be visible):

Similar to questionnaires, chart items are a collection of questions and instructions. Click on New item and choose whether to add a new question (an item that is fillable when completing a patient chart) or a new instruction (a static piece of text that is used to provide instructions).

To learn about the different types of questions that you can add to a chart item, visit the help article, Questionnaire and chart item question types on Embodia.