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

What are chart items?

Chart items are the building blocks of a patient chart. Each chart is made up of multiple chart items (blocks).

Embodia provides a library of chart items you can use, but you can also create your own:

• Personal chart items – visible only to you.

• Clinic chart items – if you are the clinic manager, you can create chart items that anyone in your clinic can use.

You can learn more about using Embodia’s pre-built chart items in the help article, Using pre-built chart items. 

Here's a Lego Analogy to explain how chart items and templates work together:

• Chart items = Individual Lego blocks
  Each brick (chart item) is small, reusable, and has a specific purpose—like "Vitals," "Body Chart," or "SOAP Notes."

• Templates = Completed Lego models
  You combine different blocks (chart items) to build something useful and fully formed—like a new patient intake template or follow-up visit template.

If you want to change the way a block looks, you update it once, and every model that uses that block is automatically updated.

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 Chart Template feature (described in more detail in the help article, Creating templates) to group together chart items into chart templates you frequently use.

This way you can create many chart templates from the same chart items without having to rebuild the questions from scratch or rely on having duplicate information.

This approach saves time long-term—if a question needs updating, you only edit it once rather than in multiple duplicated chart items.

To illustrate this efficiency in action, we’ve come up with an example. 

Example: Recommended vs. Not recommended chart item creation

Not recommended

Creating 2 chart items with repeated fields/questions:

• 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

The chart items created in the "Not recommended" approach include some duplication. A more efficient approach would be to separate the duplicate information into their own (smaller) chart items 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 chart item.

The three chart items above (and possibly more) could all be grouped together into one chart template.

Note: If you are not the clinic manager, you can only create chart items for your personal account.

Creating a chart item

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.

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 (for patients), chart items are a collection of questions and instructions (for you or your practitioners, within charts). 

As shown below, 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.