Are You Making Yourself Clear? You Can't Communicate, or Think, Effectively If You Can't Write Clearly

In the not too distant past, illegible handwriting was considered to be the biggest problem with medical record keeping. Now the primary problem with medical records is that they are disorganized, and usually undigested, data dumps. A solution to at least part of this problem lies in utilizing the principles of the problem-oriented record. When one contemplates the optimal format for progress notes, it is worth considering the purposes of progress notes. While progress notes do, of course, play a role in billing, the primary purposes of a progress note should be to provide efficient and effective communication with all who are caring for that patient and to facilitate efficient and effective contemplation of the condition of and the plans for that patient. Although it is beyond the scope of this treatise on creating progress notes, it is also worth pointing out that all patient care notes will also occasionally have legal implications and lawyers reading clinical notes will pay far more attention to assessments and plans than they will to data and results recorded in progress notes that are always easily available elsewhere in the patient record. In other words, lawyers reviewing medical records want to know what the clinicians caring for a patient were thinking, in addition to what those clinicians actually did for that patient. While all of these issues must be kept in mind, we will focus primarily on the role of clinical notes in providing optimal patient care, particularly in the realm of cardiothoracic surgery, though the principles to be enunciated can apply to most disciplines and to most clinical environments.