Pinned Notes
The goal of pinned notes is to allow you to keep the most important information about clients at the top their timeline, so that instead of digging through their notes and intake forms, you can find it at a predictable place.
The nice thing about this feature is that pinned notes can be populated automatically by pulling information from intake forms and treatment notes. Additionally, intake forms and treatment notes can pull data from a client's pinned note. But before we go into that, let's look at the basic characteristics of pinned notes.
NOTE: Do not used both pinned notes and question mapping at the same time. This would cause a conflict and the pinned note would take precedence, likely resulting in issues with data such as client demographics and such.
What is a Pinned Note?
A pinned note works mostly like any other notes; you can edit it, lock it, duplicate it, share it, fax it, etc. However, it has a few special powers that allow it to be created and populated automatically.
Where to Find a Client's Pinned Note?
Pinned notes are always located at the top of a client's timeline. There can be only one pinned note for each client. When a pinned note is not in the client's timeline, it means it hasn't been created yet.
Basic Example
As an example, let's say we want our pinned notes to contain a list of clients' current medications, supplements and dietary habits. We also want this information to be initially populated by clients. Let's assume we are already collecting this information through our intake forms.
Mapping Questions to a Pinned Note
The first step is to map the questions from our intake questionnaire to our pinned note. To do so, we will open our intake questionnaire, go to each question we want see in our pinned notes, and check the Pin to Client Profile box (see image).
Now that we pinned the questions, IntakeQ will create or update a client's pinned note every time they submit a form.
The same can be done to note templates. In this case, the pinned note will be updated every time you lock a treatment note that has pinned questions.
How to Populate Pinned Notes Based on Existing Forms/Notes?
The example described above will work for any new intakes/notes that are created going forward, but you probably already have a lot of data in your account from existing clients. Luckily, we have a way to process all your previous forms with a click of a button.
- Make sure you mapped/pinned all the relevant questions as described in the previous section.
- Navigate to "Lists > Clients" and select "Profile Settings" in the top right corner of the page.
- Navigate to the "Pinned Notes" tab and click on one or both links shown in the image below (depending on whether you want to pull information from intake forms or treatment notes, or both).
This operation will go through each form/note and check if the respective client's pinned note needs to be updated. Note that because this will update several records at once, we chose a conservative approach and this method will not override any existing information, it will simply add questions if they are not present in a client's pinned note yet.
How to Populate New Forms/Notes Based on Pinned Notes?
We can also enable information to flow in the opposite direction, so that when we send a form to a client, or create a new note, information from the client's pinned note is used to auto-populate the new form. Like the previous section, this behavior is enabled in Client Profile Settings page.
How to Create a Single Pinned Note Manually?
So far, we looked at how to have pinned notes created automatically based on intake forms and treatment notes, but in some scenarios you may not have those available for certain clients yet. If you go to a client profile and they don't have their pinned note in their timeline, you can create it manually by following the steps below:
- Go to client profile and click on the "Add Note" button.
- In the New Note dialog, select the option "Create Pinned Note" from the dropdown list.
- Click on "Continue".
This will create a pinned note for the current client based on all the pinned questions that are found in your form templates. It will even try to populate them with actual data from previous forms and notes.
Customizing Individual Pinned Notes
Since pinned notes work like other notes, you can add items to it dynamically using this method, or drag and drop items from other forms/notes by using this method.