Why a template is worth setting up
A treatment note template is a reusable skeleton for documenting a patient visit — a saved set of headings and prompts that a practitioner starts from instead of a blank text box. You build the template once here, in Settings > Treatment Note Templates, and from then on it appears as a starting point whenever someone adds a note on a patient's Notes tab.
The value isn't just saving a few seconds of typing headings. A template is really a decision your clinic makes once about what a "complete" note looks like, so that decision doesn't have to be re-made — inconsistently — by every practitioner on every visit. When notes across your team follow the same shape, a colleague covering someone's caseload can find the information they need without hunting for it, an insurer or auditor reviewing a chart sees a predictable structure, and a practitioner reviewing their own history of a patient can scan quickly instead of re-reading prose.
- What a treatment note template actually is, and why it pays off
- How to structure one so it saves real time (SOAP-style sections)
- Creating, editing, and removing templates
- What happens to notes already written when you change a template
- Where templates show up for staff
Designing a template that's actually faster to use
A poorly designed template is worse than no template at all — it turns into just another form practitioners have to fight with, and they'll quietly go back to typing free-text notes instead. A well-designed one disappears into the workflow: the practitioner sees a heading, knows exactly what belongs under it, and moves on.
Most clinics get good results by structuring templates around the familiar SOAP pattern — Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan — because it maps naturally onto how a visit actually unfolds:
| Section | What goes here | Why it's its own section |
|---|---|---|
| Subjective | What the patient reports: symptoms, pain levels, how they've been since the last visit | Keeps the patient's own words separate from your clinical interpretation |
| Objective | What you observe or measure: range of motion, vitals, test results, exam findings | Objective findings need to be easy to find on their own, especially for progress comparisons across visits |
| Assessment | Your clinical interpretation of the subjective and objective findings | Separates "what I found" from "what I think it means"— important if a note is ever reviewed by someone else |
| Plan | Next steps: treatment given today, home exercises, follow-up interval, referrals | The part most likely to be scanned quickly before the next visit, so it needs to stand on its own |
SOAP isn't mandatory — it's a strong default, not a requirement enforced by the builder. Some specialties do better with a different shape: a mental health practice might prefer sections for presenting concern, risk assessment, and session plan; a physiotherapy clinic might want dedicated sections for outcome measures and exercise prescription. The point isn't the specific labels, it's committing to some consistent shape and using it everywhere.
It's worth building more than one template if your clinic sees genuinely different visit types — an initial consultation needs room for history-taking that a five-minute follow-up doesn't. Forcing every visit type through one generic template is a common reason templates get abandoned: staff either leave half the fields blank on short visits, or feel boxed in on longer ones.
Creating a template
Open Treatment Note Templates
Go to <strong>Settings > Treatment Note Templates</strong>.
Add a new template
Start a new template and give it a clear, descriptive name — name it by visit type or specialty (for example <code>Initial Consultation — Physiotherapy</code>) rather than something generic like <code>Template 1</code>, so staff can tell templates apart at a glance when several exist.
Define the structure
Set up the sections and prompts you want staff to fill in for this type of note. Favor a small number of well-labeled sections with specific prompts over a long list of vague ones.
Save
Save the template to make it available immediately when staff document a visit.
Editing and removing templates
Open an existing template from the list to change its name or structure, or remove a template you no longer need from the same list. Most clinics revisit their templates after a few months of real use — once staff have actually written dozens of notes against a template, gaps and awkward wording tend to surface that weren't obvious when the template was first designed.
Where templates are used
Templates you build here show up when staff add a new note from a patient's Notes tab, letting them start from a consistent structure instead of a blank page. That's also where you'll see the practical payoff of the design choices you made on this settings page — a well-structured template turns note-writing into filling in prompts rather than composing prose from scratch.