EN
Comparing visits is the feature that gets most clinics to start keeping records digitally in the first place. But it only works when the material was recorded in a way that can be lined up. A few minutes at the assessment record decide whether, a year on, your patient records are a working tool or an archive nobody opens.
1. The assessment title is the only thing you see in the list
The title is a required field because it appears in every search result. It is the title, not the content, that leads you to the right entry, so it should say plainly what kind of visit it was: ‘First appointment’, ‘Post-transplant follow-up’, ‘Follow-up after three months of treatment’.
The date is added for you, so putting it in the title only takes up space. What does help is titles that read as a series within one patient record. Then the list of assessments on its own tells the story of your work together before you open a single entry.
2. Notes and recommendations are two different texts for two different readers
The system keeps them apart on purpose, and this is the pair most often confused:
- The assessment notes stay inside the system. You read them, and so does the specialist who takes over if you refer the patient on. This is the place for observations, doubts and anything you’ll need at the next visit.
- The recommendations leave the system - by text, by email or as a printable PDF. They are written for the patient, so write them in the language you use with them.
The recommendations field has a character counter, because the length limit on a text message sits with the operator. Going over the limit deletes nothing: the recommendations save as normal, but the message will not go out. So if the recommendations are going by text, the counter is a real editorial limit, not a suggestion.
Documentation is good when it lets you reconstruct a visit without having to remember it.
3. Images: repeatability matters more than how many
A comparison only works for frames you can lay over one another. It is not about the quality of a single image; it is about the next assessment being taken under comparable conditions: the same device, the same area, the same order of shots. Then the difference on screen is a difference in the image, not a difference in the way you photographed it.
Add images straight from the camera, in the assessment window, rather than saving them to disk first and loading them from a file. File import is there for material from other systems or from the patient; in day-to-day work it only adds a step, and that step is where images end up attached to the wrong visit.
A visit with 30 frames is not better documented, only harder to work with. When you compare, you have to go through all of them to find the two that show something.
4. Compare two assessments, three at most
The system sets the selected assessments side by side in three groups: assessment notes, recommendations and images. The images line up in columns, in the order you selected them, so the more you select, the narrower each column. In practice two assessments work best, three at a push; beyond that the comparison stops being readable at exactly the point where you start to need it.
To show a longer course of treatment, run several comparisons in pairs - first visit against follow-up, that follow-up against the next one - rather than one view of six assessments at once.
5. Archive instead of deleting
Deleting a patient or an assessment cannot be undone, and it takes everything with it: images, attachments, invoices. Archiving tidies things up just as well - the patient drops off your working list and out of search results - but it keeps the full record and can be reversed at any time.
The rule of thumb is simple: delete only what was created by mistake. Anything that actually happened goes to the archive.
Checklist before you save an assessment
- Does the title say what kind of visit it was, without opening the entry?
- Do the notes contain what you’ll need at the next visit?
- Are the recommendations written for the patient, and do they fit the channel you’ll send them through?
- Were the images taken under conditions comparable with the previous assessment?
- Has the patient signed the GDPR consent form, if this is a first appointment?
None of these takes more than a few seconds while the assessment is still in front of you. Reconstructing any of them six months later costs many times more, or cannot be done at all.