Wondering how you can make the most out of Scribenote? We have different types of auto-notes for you to use. Read more about them here:
Follow these tips to get the most efficient and accurate notes you can!
Best Practice #1: Record for one patient at a time
Scribenote works best for recording one patient appointment at a time. If you have appointments with multiple patients, or you carry on a recording throughout multiple appointments, Scribenote will have trouble creating an accurate SOAP note! Not to mention, it will also be more difficult to keep track of patient appointments and conversations you had that day.
For these reasons, please only create one Scribenote note per patient appointment. If you need to leave the appointment for any reason and then come back to it, we have some easy ways to handle this which we'll go over in the next section.
Best Practice #2: Use the pause button when taking long breaks
If you need to take a break in the middle of recording for any reason, such as passing the device on to another staff member (eg. a technician taking history, then handing it off to the DVM to do the examination) or leaving the room for a bit, please use the pause button to pause recording.
Doing so will prevent occasional issues with transcription. Sometimes, if there is a lot of "dead air" or no speaking for a while during an appointment, our transcription service can trip up, preventing the note from being processed correctly.
Best Practice #3: Stop the recording and add on to it later
When you need to take a longer pause or leave an appointment for an extended period of time (eg. you have multiple patients that you're alternating between at the same time and you need to go between exam rooms), please stop the recording.
You can easily pick it back up from where you left off by using our Add To feature. To do this, open the note for the recording you just stopped, and click the Add button next to the audio player.
This will allow you to record another section to be included in the same Scribenote note. It will be combined with the original recording and then re-processed into a SOAP note which will include all the original and newly added information.
This also works great for when you forgot to mention something during the appointment, or if you want to add follow-up results from labs or diagnostics, or for anything else you want to include! More details here:
Important Disclaimer: Whenever a new recording is added to a note, the existing note will get re-processed and a completely new note will be generated. Any edits make prior to Add To will get overwritten.
Best Practice #4: Make sure your microphone can clearly pick up your audio
We recommend running a test appointment or two to make sure your appointment audio is clearly being captured. Remember: if you can't hear what you said, Scribenote won't be able to either! 😉
Leave your phone on a counter, exam table, or anywhere in the room where it can pick up your voice clearly. You may need to play around to find the optimal location that works for you.
You should not need to use an external microphone, most modern device microphones work well for capturing audio (especially cell phones). If you'd prefer to use a microphone just to make sure your audio is crystal clear, we recommend a small lapel microphone (bluetooth or wired - just make sure the cable doesn't get in your way)!
Best Practice #5: Use for general practice appointments
We recommend that you use it for general practice appointments because it is optimized for standard exams and may not recognize specific terms of other practices. Recording for chiropractic, acupuncture, etc. appointments may not be as successful as its intended use.
Best Practice #6: Just talk!
Don't worry about filler words like uhms or ahs. Don't worry about dictating punctuation. Don't worry about spelling words out. Scribenote's Medical Record is NOT dictation (unless you use the Dictation appointment type)! Continue your appointment as you usually would. You don't need to dictate or worry about random unrelated chit-chat. Talk to your clients about their day — it won't end up in your medical record!
Best Practice #7: The more context, the merrier!
If you find that Scribenote is leaving out details that you discussed or contradicting what you said, consider examining whether the transcript clearly captured those details. Scribenote creates notes based on the context in the transcript, so if a detail was barely mentioned or didn't come across clearly in the transcript, odds are it won't be emphasized in the final SOAP. You can try Adding to the recording which will reprocess the note with the added context, or checking the "Show Data" tab (only on app.scribenote.com) to see if the missing information was caught there.