Templates Are the Whole Point
An EMR that makes you type a full note from scratch is slower than paper. An EMR with good templates turns a routine visit into a few taps and a sentence of free text. Building them well is the highest-return setup task.
Start From Your Real Case Mix
Pull your last month of diagnoses. Ninety per cent will be a short list: upper respiratory infection, hypertension follow-up, type 2 diabetes review, gastritis, viral fever, allergic rhinitis, low back pain, UTI, anxiety, and so on. Build a template for each of your top twenty first.
What Each Template Should Contain
- Pre-filled defaults for the typical presentation: common history points, usual examination findings, standard investigations, and a default prescription, all editable.
- Structured fields for vitals, diagnosis, and drugs, so data is reportable and safety checks work.
- A free-text box for the patient's actual story and your reasoning. Never force the narrative into checkboxes.
Structure vs Free Text
Structure what you need to count, trend, or check: vitals, diagnosis codes, medicines, allergies. Leave free text for anything that varies patient to patient. Over-structuring makes charting a chore and pushes doctors to skip fields.
Avoid Note Bloat
Copy-forward and heavy templates can produce long notes that say little. Keep templates lean. A reviewer, or a court, should be able to see what you actually found and thought on that day.
Maintain Them
- Review templates at the end of week one of go-live, when gaps are obvious.
- Add drugs and findings you keep typing manually.
- Retire templates nobody uses.
- Re-check drug defaults when guidelines change.
Well-built templates typically bring consultation time back to baseline within two weeks of an EMR rollout, then below it.