Note templates for each visit type, in 5 steps

Start with your three most common visit types, and try the templates with one clinician before the rest of your clinicians switch.

Nate Peereboom
Co-founder, JotPsych

Each of your prescribers charts the med check a different way, and many don't finish notes until after clinic. One template for each visit type gives every note the same sections. Preset text leaves less to type.

1. Pick the three visit types your clinicians chart most. Count last month's visits on your schedule by type, and start with your top three, such as the med check, the intake, and the therapy hour.
2. Give each visit type one template with set sections. Agree on the sections and their order with your clinicians. Chandani Narula, a practice administrator at Hartford Healthcare Medical Group, wants every clinician on the same template for the same kind of care, and allows small changes. "A little bit of tweak here and there is understandable," Narula said.
3. Add preset text for the parts that repeat. Your intake template can carry a consent statement, and your therapy template a list of interventions. Narula's neurology clinics keep a preset phrase, added with one click, for each reason a patient books a Botox injection.
4. Make each template the default for its visit type. Set the default once. Then the right template opens for every visit you book. Your clinicians don't pick a template by hand.
5. Try the templates with one clinician, and time the notes. Time that clinician's notes before you switch, and again a month after. Narula runs each change in one office first: "I always run it with my one office, which is going to give me least resistance." Then switch your other clinicians.

In a 2024 national study of outpatient physicians, notes took 2.3 hours of EHR time on average for every 8 hours of scheduled patients.