As practitioners, one of your most valuable resources are your treatment notes. 📝 Here's how to get started with creating a treatment note in Cliniko.

Only users with the practitioner role can create treatment notes. If you're an administrator or do reception work, consider adding notes to a patient's file, or utilising file attachments.

Add a treatment note

Head to the Appointments page, and click on the patient/appointment you want to add a treatment note to:

Click the Add treatment note button:

This will take you to the treatment notes screen, where you can start writing immediately! You'll see a few things on the new note that you're writing:

The template.
The appointment.
The ability to copy the previous note.

You can make things super-duper easy and relate a treatment note template to its corresponding appointment type, which removes step of needing to select a template each time you write a note for this particular appointment! However, the ability to select a template will always be there for you, no matter what. 😀

Below is an example of a treatment note, in "writing/edit" mode:

Let's go through a breakdown of what each item on that page means!

The template: this is, well, the template that you're using to write the note! Templates can be set up by Administrators and can be used by any practitioner to write notes. You can create one or upload an image or PDF file of a template you already have. The template will be the "backbone" of your note—it will provide you with the relevant fields to write comments and answer questions in.
The appointment: this will be the date and type of appointment that this note is "related" to. If you're writing a note that's not related to an appointment, it will just say "None"!
Copy previous note: this is useful if you tend to write similar information each time you write a note for this patient. By using this function, you can automatically copy in what you wrote in the most recent note for this patient, as long as the note was using the same template as this one!

Saving treatment notes

Once you've written a note, saving it will be super-duper important! Cliniko has a handy "auto-save" function that works around the clock, but we always recommend that you press "save", no matter what. There are a couple of things to keep in mind about saving, though!

The Save as draft button means that you can come back and edit this note at a later date. When you save as a draft, the note is still "editable", meaning it can be modified!
The Save as final button is, well, final. You cannot go back and edit a note that's been saved as final. No one—not even an administrator—can.

So, please take a few moments to consider before saving—will you need to come back and modify this note for any reason? Then save it as a draft! Are you 100% finished with the note? Save it as a final copy, if that's the case!

Pin treatment notes

Is there a particular treatment note that you need to frequently reference? Perhaps the note from a patient’s initial consultation has a whole lot of history that you want to refer back to while writing other notes. We recommend you pin those treatment notes to the top!

Indicated by a little pink pin icon, a pinned note will always show up at the top of the previous notes section (while you’re writing a new note):

And it’ll also always show up at the top of the main treatment notes page:

To pin your note of choice, simply look for the pin icon in the upper-right of any note:

Once pressed, that’ll pin that note to the top!

This should be handy if you ever need to refer back to the history you took down when the patient first visited you (or anything, really)!

One of the awesome things about Cliniko is that you can create as many treatment note templates as you need, and if you have a friend or colleague using Cliniko, they can share their templates with you!