Treatment notes are an integral part of patient management, and one of the super cool things you can do with Cliniko is create custom templates. Developing a template that flows well and has enough information for you to work from is integral to using the treatment notes function effectively while seeing a patient!

With treatment note templates, you can:

We'll also show you:

Head to Settings, and then click Treatment note templates:

You'll notice that we include a couple for you, and you can use these (or not!). You'll also see two options at the top. You can either Add template where you'll create one from scratch or you can Import an existing image or PDF file you have:

To add a new template, click the Add template. Then, give your new template a name, and click the Add section button:

You'll see a few fields that can be filled in/selected:

The section title is going to be purely that—the title of this section! A section will have questions within it. 

You can also add a section description to your treatment notes. This would come in handy if you have a lot of sections and need to make the breakdown of each one more clear!

For example, you might have a section that is meant for pre-treatment questions. When designing your template, you might have a section called "Pre-treatment questions", and you would include questions within it.
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There are different types of questions you can include in the template, as well:

If you have your own image or PDF treatment note template, you can upload this directly. Additionally, if you have a friend or colleague that has created treatment note templates in their own Cliniko account, they can also share their template with you to add to yours!

Hit Import from the main treatment note template screen. You'll then be able to give your template a name, and upload the file:

Once you've chosen the file, it will automatically be uploaded. You can then hit Import template and Cliniko will process it:

Once the file has been successfully uploaded to Cliniko, it's ready to be used as your treatment note template. You can check it and make any changes if needed. You can check out our full guide on uploading your own treatment note templates where we go into more detail about this feature.

Below is a sample of what a template (in "create/edit" mode) looks like with each type of question:

These are the kinds of questions that would require longer answers—maybe you're asking a patient to discuss their medical history. A paragraph text question would be a good candidate here, as it will let you write a lot of details in about the patient! 

These are the types of questions that would require shorter answers—nothing super long and detailed. 

These are good if you have a question that might have a lot of possible answers, but you only need to select one. For example, you could use multiple choice questions to indicate pain levels, or indicators regarding the regularity of an incident. If the answer isn’t available in the list, you can also add an "Other" option which will allow you or your team to write in a new custom value.

These are similar to multiple choice, but you can select more than one answer. You can use check boxes to provide for all the possible scenarios that you may encounter during testing and treatment! Checkbox questions can also have an "Other" option added to your list of possible answers, which will allow you or your team to write in a new custom value.

If you need to mark up diagrams and charts, this is definitely for you! You can use Cliniko's body chart templates or upload your own, but what you'll be able to do is include any body chart in your treatment notes! You can learn more about this over here.

With the Date field type you'll be able to select past or future dates quickly. You’ll see a drop-down for year, month, and an option to clear the date that was previously selected. You can use this to select a date of injury, date of treatment, or any important dates you want to make note of.

One option you have when setting up your template is specific settings for printing. This is at the bottom of the template when you're editing it. 

You can opt to automatically include some specific information on the PDF version of the treatment note, so that when it's printed out, it will include the following information:

When you write a treatment note, you will use one of the templates that has been created! Using the same example template above, here is what that would look like when you select it from the patient's file:

Here's what it looks like in the patient's file when it's been saved:

And here's an example of what it would look like when it has content in it, and has been saved as a PDF:

Now that your treatment note templates are created, you can start writing your notes, and you can assign a template to an appointment type to make things a little easier when selecting which template to use!

You can also export templates if you want to share them with a colleague who also uses Cliniko, or if someone you know is a Cliniko user and wishes to share their templates with you, you can import them!