Practice Management on Embodia - Part 1: Charting

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.

 

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.

Creating your private chart items

Let's start by going over how to create your private chart items. A private chart item will only be available to you. It won't be accessible to anyone else, even your colleagues.

To create a chart item, click on Charting settings under the Charting tab in the top bar.

On the Chart items page, click on New chart item.

 

Creating chart items for your clinic

If you're the clinic manager and would like to create chart items that can be accessed by anyone that is part of your clinic, click on Charting settings > For the clinic account under Charting in the top bar:

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 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).

 

The following are the different types of questions that you can add to a chart item:

• Free text: When filling out a response to this type of question, you will be able to use your keyboard to enter text. Free text questions can be further restricted to the following types:
  • Multiline text: This will show a text editor where you can type in long text that can span over multiple lines. A good example of this type of question would be the question to enter each of your Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan (SOAP) entries.
  • Short text: This will show a simple text box to provide short answers, for instance, to provide a date.
  • Round numbers: This will show a simple text box that only accepts round numbers. This can be used for questions that require a numeric answer, such as entering the heart rate (in bpm). 
  • Decimal numbers: This will show a simple text box that only accepts decimal numbers. This can be used for questions that require a numeric answer, such as entering the weight (in kg). 
• Single answer: When filling in a response to this type of question, you will only be able to select one of the pre-populated answers. Some examples would be Yes/No questions, or a question about the patient's gender.
• Multiple answers: This is a select-all-that-applies type of question: you will only be able to select one or multiple of the pre-populated answers.
• Range: When filling a response to this type of question, you can drag a dial across a range with predefined lower and upper limits. The Visual Analog Scale is one type of example of this question type.
• Drawing: When filling in a response to this type of question, you can use your mouse or your fingers to draw on a canvas. You can also set a background image to add markings on top of it (for instance a body chart).
• File upload: When filling out a response to this type of question, you will be able to upload a file from your computer, such as an image or a PDF file.