Canonical Sentences (Dr. Barker)

Another way to add items to a note is to insert options to specific paragraphs.  PowerNotes are divided up into “Paragraphs” and “Sentences”.  The Paragraphs such as “Visit Information”, “Chief Complaint”, and “History of the Present Illness”.  Paragraphs are separated by a clear space (that you can free text into).  Within each paragraph are a number of “sentences” separated by horizontal lines.  Below is the paragraph Visit Information and its five component sentences:

If you click on a paragraph’s name – an icon in the upper left appears.  You can also get this icon by clicking on a paragraph name in the light blue navigation pane on the left side.  Click the icon.

 

Close up of this icon:  

I am in the Physical Examination Paragraph, if you click it this “Insert Sentence” popup opens: 

These are sort of “developers tools” that were not used to build a particular note, but are available if you want to insert them.  They are called “Canonical Sentences”. Let’s choose the one that says “Feet” and click it – it will highlight in red and a check mark will appear.  Then click the single arrow at the bottom of the box (this is a scroll down one line).  Click the “Lines and Tubes” line it will highlight in red and a check mark will appear – the check by “Feet” will remain.  Now click OK.  The double arrows scrolls the choices by one whole page ~12 choices.  

Now what you have is the original Physical Examination Section with the two extra sentences “Lines and Tubes” near the top and “Feet” added near the bottom.

 

If we click on the chevrons to expand the Feet sentence content you get this which would allow you to document a lot of foot findings. 

 

Keep in mind that each paragraph has its own menu of canonical sentences – eventually you will get familiar with what is available.  Here for example is the second page of choices under the “Review and Management” paragraph.  When a canonical sentence has a chevron (right pointing arrowhead) as “Sleep studies” does here it means it has sub-sentences available.

  

You can, if you want insert more than one of these into the note. 

  

At this point you may be saying that this is an impossible amount of stuff to try to remember.  The logical thing to do is explore this as a tool – pick out the things that may be useful to you in your role and insert them and save it as a pre-completed note.  In this example if your work included reading sleep studies you would insert these sentences and then save the expanded template as a Pre-completed Note called maybe “Sleep studies”. 

These are just tools available to you.   You don’t have to use them.  But the best and swiftest craftsmen make the best use of the available tools.