Shorthand – A Different Type of SOAPnote Tag

The sections of this guide are:

The Shorthand Tag

The Shorthand Tag allows a user to expand text with just a few keystrokes. The idea is that a library of abbreviated shorthand codes could be typed into text boxes and text areas. These are expanded as you type.

A user can make a personal library of Shorthand abbreviations to use with their personal forms. You can have a huge list of these abbreviations, but for demonstration purposes the example below has simply one Shorthand Tag. It is at www.soapnote.org/featured/improved-shorthand-function and is pictured below.

In this example, if you type ‘!go’ it will replace ‘!go’ with a short paragraph. The image below is after typing in ‘!go’ but before pressing the space bar.

This is the expanded text after pressing the space bar.

There’s really not much to it if you look at the Live Form. But if you click on the upper right hand corner and select “Edit Markup” you can see the working part of the Shorthand Tag.

Below you can see that if the user types in ‘!go’ then it will be expanded to ‘You can make long snippets of text. It can help you with text you use frequently. We hope you like this!’

But a user might want to re-use their library of Shorthand Tags. That’s where the Frontload Tag comes in.

The Frontload Tag – Not Just for Shorthand

SOAPnote users can extend any form with the Frontload Tag, but it works really well with the Shorthand Tag. The Frontload Tag brings in the contents of another SOAPnote. It front loads another SOAPnote so that a user might re-use a shorthand library or any other SOAPnote form that they (or anyone else) created. To use it, you just put it at the front of your form and include the last part of the SOAPnote’s URL. For the Shorthand Tag used above, the last part of the URL is “shorthand/shorthand-base”. The example for this is at www.soapnote.org/shorthand/frontload-shorthand. You can check this and see how the Shorthand Tag and the Frontload Tag work together, and possibly how the Frontload Tag might be used to make more modular SOAPnotes.

With the screenshot above, you can see the format for the Frontload Tag. It will apply to the SOAPnote Form that follows.

Above is the Live Form view. See the yellow/orange note at the top that tells you there is a Shorthand library associated with it.

Above see the output. “%ros” has been entered in “Education” (not exactly the right place for that but space was an issue for the screen shot). In the output below, see the expanded text from %ros has been added.