Medical healthcare professionals have to deal with the issue of physician burnout. They have a challenging responsibility to see and treat patients every day and also complete operational tasks including charting and taking lengthy patient notes from each encounter. It is quite a complex and time-consuming undertaking as all medical records need to be documented precisely and in the right way.
What are SOAP Notes?
SOAP notes facilitate healthcare providers by helping them track patient’s progress by maintaining all initial patient evaluations, diagnosis, and treatment facts in a standardized format. These SOAP notes can also be shared with other clinicians to enhance care coordination and the patient care process. Soap notes provide an easy way for providers to track a patient’s medical records. When the patient records are organized in a well-defined template then chances of miscommunication and human errors are reduced.
Categories of SOAP Notes
There are 4 components of SOAP Notes which include;
- Subjective – Subjective is what the patients have to say about their health-related issues.
- Objective – This is the complete record of the physical examination of different patient conditions. These include observations such as pulse rate, BP, and temperature.
- Assessment – Assessment comprises a summary of your patient’s diagnosis. For different patient conditions, there might be more than a single diagnosis probability that can be included in the assessment.
- Plan – The final component of the SOAP Notes is the treatment plan which will be followed by the practitioner. This includes medication, surgeries, or therapies to treat a patient’s condition.
Key Benefits of SOAP Notes for Medical Professionals
- SOAP notes facilitate the efficient and prompt location of a patient’s complete information.
- The robust SOAP notes help to formulate strategies to meet desired treatment goals.
- Through the help of SOAP notes, doctors are well aware of the patient’s health conditions and therefore in a better position to provide an effective diagnosis for improved patient outcomes.
- Helps to reduce physician burnout
EMR Software Systems with SOAP Notes
There are some robust Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Software solutions that offer the functionality of built-in SOAP notes templates. With the SOAP notes feature the patient records that providers enter are automatically saved on your software system. Here are a few examples of EMR Software vendors that offer the facility of customized SOAP notes templates that are easy to create and use by the healthcare provider.
If your medical practice still hasn’t purchased an EMR software solution then we advise that they should go for a software system that offers built-in SOAP notes templates which includes the complete report of a patient. If you have an EHR Software or a Practice Management (PM) Software system that doesn’t offer this functionality then you can download SOAP notes templates for free from these websites, SampleTemplates, and Examples.
