EMR / EDR - Building Templates
This article seeks to cover the basic workflow for building an EMR/EDR Form Template from beginning to finish. We'll cover recommended steps and practices when building your Form Templates and demonstrate how to effectively utilize the Narrative View to provide a quick readout of a finished patient form. If you have any issues or are confused by any of the steps provided, don't hesitate to contact MacPractice Support!
If you're looking for a more basic overview of the EMR/EDR Ability, click here.
You can read more about Form Elements and Pull Fields in their respective articles.
If you are interested in custom templates designed by our MacPractice Support team, please read this article here.
Workflow Overview of Form Template Creation
Let's first cover the general workflow of creating a Form Template.
First, you'll create the Form Template in one of your category nodes. This new template will be blank when it is first created.
Next, you'll prepare Form Sections that will be used in your Template. You can create your own sections from scratch, or use existing sections found in the Sections folder in the sidebar.
For new sections, you'll also need to edit each Form Section's Narrative side, which contains “pull fields” that correspond to each element present in the section. How these pull fields are ordered and formatted will determine how the narrative of the from will read on a patient form. We recommend editing the Narrative AFTER adding all desired Form Elements into a Form Section!
Once you've prepared your Form Sections, you can then add them to a Form Template.
We recommend generating a test form on a test patient account to ensure it looks how you'd like. Make sure your forms are ready and tested before using them in a live environment!
You're done!
Creating a Form Template
To create a new Form Template, follow these steps:
Select a Category node in the EMR/EDR Sidebar. These are the pink folders that can be added in the Form Category node. See this article for more details on creating additional Category nodes and an overview of the Sidebar contents.
Once selected, click the Green Plus button to add a new template.
This will bring up the Forms Palette, which is where you will specify the name of your template. This is a required field that will need to be filled in before saving.
Save the new template using the Command + S keys or the “Save Record” option in the Edit Menu.
For information on the other functions within the palette, see this article.
Adding Form Sections
Next, you'll need to decide on what Form Sections you wish to add. To add existing sections, follow these steps:
Click the Forms Sections node above the pink Category nodes. If the node is minimized, as shown in the example, click the “Reload” button in the toolbar to reveal all of the sections currently in your database.
Next, scroll down in the Sidebar to your template and single-click to select it within the pink Category folder.
While selected on the template, scroll back up to the list of sections.
Drag and Drop the desired sections from the Sidebar to the middle Main View of the screen. You will start to see sections accumulate in the Main View as you add sections.
On the right you'll see the Form Sections have been added to the Navigation Pane, which contains a complete list of all the Form Sections included in the Form Template. You can also use this pane to drag and drop to reorder sections on the template, as shown in the animation above.
Creating Custom Form Sections
If none of the existing sections contain the content needed for the intended template, you can create new custom sections with the following process:
Select the Form Sections node
Click the Green Plus button to create a new section.
In the palette, specify a name for your section in the Name field and save. For detailed information on each function located in the palette, see this article.
Notice that, if you choose to show the section title, whatever you type into the Name field will show in the grey header at the top of the section. You can show or hide the section title using the “Show Title” checkbox in the palette.
Adding Content to Form Sections
The following will guide you through how to add elements and content to your new custom form section. To learn the function, capabilities, and the palette options for each element, see this article.
While building sections it may be necessary to adjust the font or colors during this process. To activate the Font or Color windows, use the options in the Text menu under the Font option.
There are two types of elements used in EMR:
Custom elements: These are elements where the content is defined by the user. These elements are changeable and customizable.
Codified elements: These are preconfigured elements that communicate data between other parts of MacPractice, i.e. - Codified Medications pushes data to, and pulls data from, the Rx ability. Codified Allergies pushes data to, and pulls data from, the Allergies widget in Clinical. Codified elements are not changeable or customizable.
The following video will show how to add each element and certain methods on how elements are formatted or named. The lower-left corner of the video shows the keystrokes used as the elements are being added.
Video Coming Soon!!!
When you've added an Element, you can customize details about the Element in the Inspector area of the Forms Palette, shown in the image above. On the General Tab, you can typically edit the placement and size of the element by adjusting the X, Y, Width, and Height fields. You'll also want to set a clear name for this Element, which will help identify it when filling out the form, and when identifying it in the Narrative View.
You can also drag in Pull Fields, which are used to bring in information from several areas in the MacPractice database. You can drag Pull Fields into both the Form Section or the Narrative View.
A Note About large Form Sections: When building a Form Section, avoid making lots of large Form Sections. It is very beneficial to use multiple small sections, rather than one large section for a given portion of the template, as this provides additional flexibility when arranging the template. This is most important when using pull fields and formatting the Narrative. Using smaller Form Sections will also provide you more exact control over what information pulls forward from previously filled out Patient Forms when generating new Patient Forms.
Formatting Advice: Templates built by MacPractice Template Specialists typically use Lucida Grande as the font. The size varies, but typically will be 10 pt for the body of the template. Additionally, on the narrative we generally use 12 pt bold and underlined for section titles, and 14 pt bold for the name of the form.
If you want to adjust the default font type and size, you can do so in the MacPractice Menu > Preferences > EMR > General.
Editing the Narrative
Once you have added all the Form Elements you'd like to see on your Form Section and you're comfortable with their layout and customization, you will now need to setup the narrative for that section. You can switch over to the Narrative View by pressing the Command (⌘) and \ (Backslash) keys simultaneously on your keyboard, or you can switch to the narrative via the EMR/EDR Menu.
The Narrative serves as the “printable view” of the data entered into the form. In a sense, the Narrative can be considered a “final report” of that patient’s visit. For the most part, only data entered into the form and elements/sections that have been actively interacted with will show on the narrative. Generally, elements/sections that have not been interacted with will not show on the narrative, if the template has been constructed correctly. However, there are times when certain static elements will show on the narrative regardless of interaction. Depending on the content of the form, this may be in-avoidable.
In order to teach the intricacies of the Narrative View editor, let's use an example of a custom section for a "First Visit" form that includes a Textbox element for "Reason for Visit", and a checkbox that asks whether this is the patient's first visit.
If we flip over to the Narrative View of this section, these fields will be represented as such:
The top line is the name of the Form Section, and the info in the brackets {}s indicates Form Elements data pulling into the narrative. If we generated a Patient Form from a Form Template that included this Form Section, the Narrative would currently look something like this:
One of the quirks of the Narrative View editor is that when the Narrative has not been adjusted, Element names will be listed to identify these elements clearly. If the Narrative has been edited at all, these labels will not be included, and Elements added after editing the Narrative will not appear by default. This is why we recommend leaving editing the Narrative to the very end of Form Section creation.
When edited, the same Narrative View we saw above would look like this on a patient form:
As you can see, the header for the Reason for Visit field is gone, but the entered text remains. So what can we do? We'll want to format the Narrative to clearly communicate what this information is. So for the Reason for Visit field, let's denote it as such in the Narrative:
You'll note we added some bold here and a line break. You can use keyboard shortcuts like Command B and I to add in Bold and Italics (and other formatting options are in the Text Menu above).
This Narrative will look on the Patient Form like this:
This definitely lays out the Reason for Visit a bit clearer, but the checkbox isn't really working like we intend. Why is that? The reason has to do with how we have the Checkbox Element configured in the Forms Palette. Let's take a look on the image to the right --->
In the Check Box Inspector, on the Options Tab, we can see some specific options available for the Checkbox Element. Here, we can see that the "Narrative Checked" field contains "First Visit?" which was the initial name of our checkbox element. Here, we can configure it to report a different text result depending on whether the checkbox is checked or not.
If we change it to Yes and No respectively...
Then the narrative on the patient form will appear as so if this checkbox is checked ------->
This can obviously get more complicated as your Form Sections become more elaborate. This is why we strongly recommend that you keep your Form Sections small, so you can approach form template building from a modular perspective, building small pieces that you can combine. This also helps you format your narratives easily.
If you ever need to re-add a Form Element to the Narrative that you accidentally or intentionally removed, you can do so on the Forms Palette under Pull Fields. The Narrative View must be showing, and when it is, there is an additional category containing the Form Section's elements.
Adding Pull Fields To a Form
Pull Fields are identifiers that will "pull" the information from a field or area in MacPractice and print it in its place, hence the name Pull Fields. In this context, pull fields are used to populate more data onto a patient form.
To add a Pull Field to a Form Section, simply identify the Pull Field in question, and drag it into the Form Section. You can add a Pull Field to both the Form Section and the Form Section's Narrative View. For example, let's get the patient's name to pull into the form.
The Pull Fields in this placement would appear as so:
If we wanted to have the patient's name appear in the Narrative, we could simply drag those fields into the narrative in the same way:
And on the patient form Narrative View, it'd look like this:
This can obviously be a nuanced and difficult subject, but we hope this article gives you a foundation on how to begin building your forms with confidence! If you run into any issues or need advice, MacPractice Support is always available to assist you!