UPDATED NOV. 15, 2024
November 2024: NEW Streamlined Entry of Subjective and Objective Sections of SOAP Notes
Like the Treatment section update from the summer, the goal of these improvements is to minimize the laborious manual entry of the Subjective and Objective sections of your SOAP notes, making them quicker and easier to complete while also providing better clinical data for analysis of patient outcomes.
No More Manual Entry of Subjective & Objective Sections!
With this update, once you start a medical massage appointment, you’ll see a checklist of each portion of the appointment – including pre-treatment notes, treatment actions, and post-treatment notes. The Subjective and Objective portions will now occur before the actual massage, but they’ve been worked into the evaluation steps you’re already familiar with, making the process both easier and more accurate in the collection of outcomes data.
In addition to the pain scales you’re already familiar with, you’ll also see the introduction of simple questions you’ll be prompted to ask the patient before treatment. The answers you enter into these portions will automatically populate the Subjective and Objective sections of your notes – no more need to write them out from scratch!
Subjective Section Enhancements
We are now incorporating GPS and DVPRS pain scale questions into the subjective section of the SOAP notes so they can be used to populate the SOAP notes for the appointment – saving you time and effort on manual entry.
In addition to the pain scale data, the Provider App will prompt you to ask the patient subjective questions that will be included in the SOAP note. For example, in the first appointment of a referral, you’ll be prompted to ask the patient questions about the history of their injury or condition, and in subsequent visits, the questions will focus on progress or changes since the prior session(s). The app will then use these answers to log patient status and progress, so you don’t have to!
Objective Section Enhancements
For the Objective section of the SOAP notes, we will utilize the observations from the assessment currently called the “Objective Range of Motion Assessment” in the app.
For the first appointment in a referral, you will administer the objective questionnaire as you do now, which will populate the Objective section of the SOAP note – no need to do anything else for this section! In subsequent appointments, your initial observations will be carried over, and the app will prompt you to log the patient’s status relative to those observations. These inputs will then be translated into the Objective section of the SOAP notes – no need to manually enter them!
See how it all comes together in this video:
Note that these updates are being rolled out to a limited set of therapists initially, before going live network-wide over the next few weeks. Interested in being a Zeel Provider App beta tester? Email help@zeel.com with the subject line “I want to be a beta tester” to let us know!
August 2024: Update to SOAP Notes “Treatment” Section – No More Writing Out Sentences!
We’ll be releasing a new provider app version that includes a new interface for submitting the “Treatment” section of the SOAP notes. This section will be easier and faster to complete, by simply checking boxes rather than writing out details.
Instead of writing out free-form text sentences, therapists will simply indicate:
- The body parts and modalities treated for massage therapy
- Categories of patient education provided
These checkboxes and dropdown selections will then be automatically translated into SOAP notes.
With this update, therapists will select the body part and modality/technique performed, which our system will automatically translate into sentences for the SOAP note document. (Note that there will still be a free text box in case you want to include additional notes.)
We will also translate indications of what types of patient education that were provided into sentences for the SOAP note document.
July 2024: Switching to the Global Pain Scale for evaluations
Starting Monday, all patient evaluations will be completed using the Global Pain Scale (GPS) instead of the body-part specific scales (Oswestry for low back pain, Neck Disability Index for neck pain, etc.).
The Global Pain Scale is a validated questionnaire developed 20+ years ago in part by Zeel advisor Dr. Paul Lynch, a physician specializing in pain management.
Using the GPS will not only simplify evaluations for you, but will result in more consistent data on patient outcomes. This is crucial for our ongoing efforts to prove the clinical efficacy of massage, as well as the VA’s goals of reducing pain medication usage and returning Veterans to daily activity.
Here are some further details about this update:
- The GPS takes only a few minutes to administer and consists of 4 groups of 5 questions each. Zeel supplements those questions with 5 additional ones specifically addressing the VA’s goals. Click here to see a preview of the updated questions.
- You will administer both the GPS and the Objective portion of the notes (range of motion, posture observations) in the first appointment of every referral.
- You will also administer the GPS on the 5th and last appointments of each referral. You will no longer be required to complete the comprehensive Objective section in the last appt., allowing you more time to treat your patient.
- On all other visits, you will only administer the 5-question DVPRS questionnaire and SOAP notes, as is the current protocol.
June 2024: Desktop Documentation Portal
Don’t love filling out SOAP notes on your phone? If you’d rather do so on a computer, we’ve created a desktop documentation portal specifically for filling out SOAP notes!
You can access the desktop portal now at zeel.com/notes. Note that the desktop version does not currently provide access to prior SOAP notes.
We’re very excited about these updates, and we hope they will improve your experience as a medical massage provider with Zeel. We’re confident these improvements will reduce the time it takes for you to complete your clinical documentation while providing more consistent data.
Most of all, we want you to focus as much as possible on what you do best: providing essential and life-changing care to our patients.
As always, we value every provider’s feedback. If you have additional ideas on how we can improve your experience, please submit them here. Every suggestion will be reviewed by our product and clinical teams.