Patient Notes – The Health Care Blog

The Perfect Office Note? SOAP, APSO or aSOAP?

Jan 16, 2019• 3

By HANS DUVEFELT MD

I’ve been toying with this dilemma for a while: SOAP notes (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) are too long; APSO just jumbles the order, but the core items are still too far apart, with too much fluff in between. We need something better – aSOAP!

Electronic medical record notes are simply way too cumbersome, no matter in what order the segments are displayed, to be of much use if we quickly want to check what happened in the last few office visits before entering the exam room.

It is time we do something different, and I believe the solution is under our noses every day, at least if we read the medical journals:

I can be aware of what’s going on in the medical literature without reading every article. How? Think about it…

The OpenNotes Toolkit

Mar 10, 2014• 58

By Steve Downs

In writing about OpenNotes last summer, I argued that the practice of sharing clinicians’ notes with patients had moved beyond the question of whether it was a good idea (the landmark study published in Annals of Internal Medicine was pretty clear on that) to questions of how best to implement it.

As more organizations adopt the practice, it’s clear that we’re now in a phase of implementation, and experimentation with different approaches and learning. Tom Delbanco, MD, one of the project leads, often compares open notes to a drug — it does have some side effects and some contraindications for some people and some circumstances — and we all need to understand those nuances.

To make it easier for health care organizations to offer the service to their patients, the OpenNotes project team has just released a new toolkit.

The toolkit focuses on two challenges: helping organizations make the decision to implement open notes and helping organizations with all the steps involved in implementing open notes.

It includes a slide deck that lays out the results of the study and makes the case for implementation, a video profile of how a patient and her doctor have used the practice, profiles of the implementations at the pioneering sites, FAQs for clinicians and patients, and tips for clinicians on how to write open notes.

Please check it out and tell the OpenNotes team what you think: is it valuable? How could it be better?