samples: from basic to advanced

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back: making soapnotes: forms

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On this page, we’ll take a look at some sample soapnotes.  These samples might be a good launching-off point for developing your own templates, interactive forms, and calculators.

boilerplate

As you can see on this page, a boilerplate template is just some text.  There’s no form involved here.  It’s just text that you’ve posted.

If you don’t need to modify the words/sentences/paragraphs, than this one is for you.  You can copy, print, and save the text using the buttons below the text.

fillable soapnotes

You gain a lot of functionality with the fillable soapnote like this one, and it’s not too much more work to make it.  It does involve adding a Form to a Post, though.

To me, the easiest way to make your own fillable soapnote is to go to the sample forms page here.  If you hover over the one entitled “Sample form – fillable soapnote” the word “Duplicate” will appear underneath.  If you click on “Duplicate” it will make a copy that you can edit.

Open up your duplicate form.  You can rename it whatever you like (you should make note of the name, though).  You can go into it and put down any text you like.  Then where ever you want, you can put in “***” and “—”.  The “***” allow the user to tab through the note, and the “—” are for nesting within the “***”.

Once you finished editing your form, you need to save it.  Make sure you save it by clicking the blue “Update Form” button at the bottom of the page.  Once that’s done, you can publish it by adding it to a post.

To make a Post for your fillable soapnote, click on “Add New” over at the left hand side of the page under “Posts”.  (If you can’t find it, click on the “Build notes & calculators!” to take you back to the Dashboard/Admin area of soapnote.org.  Now you should definitely see the link to “Add New” over at the left hand side of the page under “Posts”.)

To put the Form on this new Post you’re making, you just click on the “Add Gravity Form” icon and choose the Form you just made.  That inserts it into the Post.  Make sure to save your post by clicking on the blue “Update” button at the bottom of the page.  If you’re having trouble, go back to this part of the user guide or let me know.

There’s also the ability to mark ‘line items’ and ‘clause items’ to page through text.

To mark a line for selection, use the string “+++”.

To mark a part (or clause) of text, just bookend it with two “###”.

You don’t have to do anything for the “fillable”, “line item”, or “clause item” buttons to show up at the bottom of your soapnote.  All you have to do is have the “***” or “—”, the “+++”, or the set of two “###” in there and it’ll automatically add them in there for you.  Pretty neat.

soapnotes with prompts

This next sample uses more of the power of the web forms.  It’s also slightly more involved to put together, but not much.

Take a look at this sample, it shows you a few of the elements of a form.  You can use free text, drop-down boxes, check boxes, and radio buttons.  If you’re trying to make someone choose one thing, that’s the radio button or drop-down box.  If you want them to be able to add multiple items, use the checkbox.  If you can’t decide (or you don’t want to make others choose), just do a text box.

Put down your prompts and get them looking the way you want them to.  Once you’re done building the layout of the form, you need to format your output.

Save the form by clicking on the blue “Update Form” button.  Go up to the top of the form and click the title of the form.  If you’re hovering over it, there is also an “Edit” link which does the same thing.  It reveals Title, Description, Label placement, Result Template, Calculation Formula, and Calculation Result.

“Result Template” is what puts all the prompts together to make your soapnote a meaningful blurb or paragraph.

If you just type a bunch of text in Result Template that will be what is put out when you click the submit button on the soapnote.  For the soapnote to grab your text, drop-down boxes, check boxes, and radio buttons, you need to add them to the Result Template.  To do this, you’ll see that each prompt has a label over at the left hand side.  It has a numbered label like “(input_1)”.  That numbered label is actually a link you can click on.  Clicking on it grabs it so you can put it in the Result Template.  Clicking the “(paste)” link at the top of the Result Template put it in there.  If it looks like “~|input_1|~” then you’re doing it right.  You can’t paste the way you normally do to put the prompt in the Result Template, you have to use the “(paste)” link.  Quirky, I know.  You’ll probably get used to it.

Once you’re done with all of this, you can save your form, publish it, and test it.  The publishing part is the same as for the fillable soapnote and in these instructions.

soapnotes with prompts and conditional input

The learning curve is pretty much flat at this point.  A soapnote with prompts and conditional input means you’re just trying to guide people through some decision making and allows you to remove irrelevant clutter.

The sample that I want you to take a look at is just the previous sample “soapnote with prompts” with an added feature.  When the user selects a pain level above zero, it asks for where the pain is.  Otherwise, you don’t see the “Location of pain” question.

So, the way to make a template like this is to go to the Form Builder and make your form.  Put down every question you want in there.  Then you’ve got to select the ones you want to hide.  You hide them by clicking on the “Advanced” tab for that particular prompt.

For example, for the “Location of pain” question I just went to the “Advanced” tab and then went down to “Enable Conditional Logic.”  Once that is checked it gives you an little logic builder to tell it what to do.  For this one, it’s set up to “Show this field if All of the following match:”  (Bold are the selected items).  Under that line it has the criteria “Pain leve…scale     is not     0” (All are selected items).

If you make changes to it, save it by clicking on the blue “Update Form” button.

Add the Form to a Post if you haven’t done this already.  Instructions are the same as for the previous two examples and are also here on this page.

calculators

I haven’t been able to find a calculator that can’t be built on the site.  It will do multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, and more.  I just made one that has a natural logarithm in it, so you don’t need to feel constrained here.

If you just want a raw calculation, you can do it.

If you have a range of values (many decision rules use point-based systems) that you need to use to interpret a score, soapnote.org is set up to do that for you, too.

The example calculator is here on this page.  Take a look at it.  All of the building of this calculator takes place in the Form Builder.  Keep in mind that you are totally on the flat part of the learning curve here.  If you’ve gotten to this point, it’s pretty much fun.  The hardest part of this whole site is just getting past the Forms and Posts piece and you’re way past that now.

So, remember when we were first talking about soapnotes with prompts?  We were looking at the form and seeing up at the top of the form when you click on the title it takes you to the Result Template.  Just below Result Template is Calculation Formula and Calculation Result.

Calculation Formula takes all of the values from the prompts adds, subtracts, multiplies, or divides them.  What goes in there are the labels for the prompts (like “~|input_1|~”) and you put them in there by either typing them out or clicking on the label’s link and then clicking on the “(paste)” link above Calculation Formula.  In there you need to put in the operators +, -, /, or * for math operations.  You also need to be careful with the parentheses.  It’s easy to goof this up and it CAN affect your calculations.  So it’s a good idea to thoroughly test any calculations so you know you’ve got it right.

But we need to back up because you still need to assign values to the prompts the users are choosing, right?  That goes in the prompt and the way you set this up is you set this up is you click on the “Enable values” checkbox.

Now you’ve got “Label” and “Value”.  I could have brought up this gem a little while ago, because it can make your regular templates a little smoother.  ”Label” is the question that you want the prompt to ask.   “Value” is the text that you want the Note builder to put in the result.  This comes in handy when you’re trying to put finishing touches on the output in the Result Template and you just want to be more detailed than you were in the form for space reasons.  It comes up, I guess you just have to trust me on this.  But I’m digressing here.  If you look at Value under the sample calculator, you’ll see each prompt has some text and then “||” and then a number.  Those are two “pipe” keys in a row, like for absolute value.  It’s a special key on your computer.

So the two pipes (||) separate the text you want in the note from the numeric value you want in the calculation.  Build your calculation in Calculation Formula.  You need to put this into your Result Template, though, or all this work is for naught.  To do that, click on the “(copy)” link to the left of the Calculation Formula and then go back up the “(paste)” link at the top of the Result Template.  This will put a “~|score|~” in the Result Template.  Then the Result Template will grab these numbers.

That’s enough if you just want to have raw calculation pasted in the result.  If you want it to be interpreted, you need to lay out how you want it interpreted.  This is all done in the “Calculation Result” part of the form.  Look at all the little pipes (“|”) in the sample’s Calculation Result!  You can put a ton of these in there and it’ll handle it.  Or you could just do one.  A single pipe (“|”) separates the interpretation from the score.  It goes high to low from right to left.

The way I do it is I figure out how many categories I’m trying to break the scores into and then I figure out the cut offs.  The category for the highest score goes on the left, then a pipe, and  then the bottom-most score for that category, then the next category, bottom-most score for that category, and so on.  You end with the last category (no pipe).  That’s because the interpreter assumes that category is for everything below the last number (including negatives).

You need to put this interpretation into your Result Template, though, or it won’t show it.  To do that, click on the “(copy)” link to the left of the Calculation Result and then go back up the “(paste)” link at the top of the Result Template.  This will stick a “~|score2|~” in there.  Then the Result Template will grab the interpretation.

Once you’ve got it down and ready for testing, save your form with the blue “Update Form” button.

Add the Form to a Post if you haven’t done this already.  Instructions are the same as for the previous three examples and are also here on this page.

There’s also a ton of other calculators and forms you can take a look at and shamelessly steal from, too.  Just “Duplicate” the form, make your changes, and then add it to a new post.  Easy!

Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions!