Clinical Trends
Trends answers one question: is this patient getting better or worse? It plots a single measured value against time for a single patient, so a direction is visible at a glance instead of being reconstructed from six visits of notes. It is available to every specialty.
Trends can only plot values recorded through a record template. A visit written as free text stores no measurements, however detailed the note is, so a patient you have seen many times can still have an empty chart. The section below explains how to fix that in three steps.
What it is for
Every measurement you take is already in the patient record, but spread across one visit at a time. Reading six consultations to work out whether a blood pressure is drifting up, or whether a pain score is really falling, is work the app can do for you.
It is a reading surface. Nothing is recorded here; you record at the visit, and Trends shows you the shape of it.
Where the values come from
When you add a clinical record you can either type free text or select a record template. A template defines named fields, and each field has a type. Only two of those types can be charted:
- Number fields, such as weight, blood pressure or glucose.
- Scale fields, such as a pain score from 0 to 10, or a mobility rating.
- Text, long text, date and choice fields are not charted. There is no number in them to put on an axis.
Templates can be scoped to a specialty, so the fields offered follow whichever specialty is active. That is also why Trends needs no specialty filter of its own: it charts whatever the active specialty’s templates declare. See Medical Records for how templates are used at a visit.
How to make a trend appear
- Go to Settings, then Templates and create or pick a template with the number or scale fields you want to follow, for example "Weight (kg)" and "Pain (0-10)".
- When you record a visit, select that template and fill those fields.
- Do it again at the next visit. Two points make a line.
Choosing a patient
The patient picker lists only patients who have at least one chartable value for the current specialty’s fields. Patients with no structured measurements are left out, because selecting them could only ever produce an empty chart.
If the app cannot work out who has data, the picker falls back to listing everyone rather than showing an empty list. "You have no patients" is a very different statement from "we could not check", and the app will not make the first one by accident.
Reading a chart
- One point is shown, but tells you nothing about direction. Two is the minimum for a trend.
- Values recorded as text that happen to be numeric are included, so records from older versions still chart.
- A recorded value of zero is plotted. A pain score of 0 is usually the goal of treatment, not missing data.
One limit worth knowing. Points are plotted by when the record was written, not by when the measurement was taken. Those are the same thing when notes are written during the visit. If your practice routinely writes visits up later, several of them land on the same date, which compresses that stretch of the line.
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