Customising Your Consultation Templates

Daobook comes with four consultation templates. Make one of your own, from nothing or from a copy of one of them, and your notes follow the way you already work — your fields, your order, your checklists.

Step 1: Open your templates

Go to Settings, open the Notifications & Templates tab and click "Consultation Templates". You'll see:

System Templates — the four built-in ones: Initial Consultation, Return Consultation, General and Simple.
Business Templates — the templates your practice has made.
My Templates — your personal templates. This list only appears in practices with more than one practitioner.

The Consultation Templates settings page with a New template button at the top, the four System Templates each with a Customise button, and a Business Templates card holding one custom template, Fertility Initial, with Edit, Archive and a delete cross

Step 2: Start a template

There are two ways in:

Click "New template" at the top to start from nothing and choose every field yourself.
Click "Customise" next to the system template closest to how you work. Daobook copies it — an Initial Consultation becomes Initial Consultation (Custom) — and opens the copy for editing. System templates themselves can't be changed.

Step 3: Name it and choose what the note shows

The editor shows your note in the middle, the way a consultation will. With no field picked, the panel on the right shows the template itself: give it a Name that says what it's for, such as Fertility Initial or Pain Follow-up, and pick its Base Type — the kind of visit it's for (Initial, Return, General or Simple). Then tick or untick Show Prescription Builder and Show Acupuncture Points under In the note. The note in the middle shows those sections while they're ticked.

The template editor for Fertility Initial: the Built-in fields and field types on the left, the note in the middle, and the template's Name, Base Type and the two In the note ticks on the right

Step 4: Arrange the fields

Click a field on the note to pick it. It takes a green edge and its settings open on the right.

Drag a field by the handle on its left to move it.
Choose Half width under Width to make a field half width, so two fields sit side by side.
Type a new Label to rename the field.
Click Remove to take a field out of new consultations. Consultations that already recorded it keep it.

Click the note away from any field to see the template's own details again.

Step 5: Add fields

Pick the field the new one should follow, then click a field on the left. It goes in under the field you picked, or at the end of its section if nothing is picked.

Built-in fields and Built-in treatment fields are the note's own fields — Chief Concern, Tongue Diagnosis, Pulse Diagnosis, TCM Diagnosis, Treatment Principle, Treatment Plan and the rest. Each can be in a template once, so a field the template already has is greyed out, and a treatment field always goes into the Treatment Details part of the note. Use these for anything the note already has a place for, so it shows up wherever the note is read, exported or printed.

Fields adds a field of your own:

Rich text — a free-text box.
Single tick box — one checkbox, such as Consent given.
Tick boxes — a checklist. Type each choice under Options, and click "+ Add option" for the next.
Diagram — places the body chart, the tongue diagram or one of your own diagrams inside the note. See Your Own Diagrams and Diagrams in Templates.
Section heading — a title line that groups the fields under it, such as History or Diagnosis and treatment. There is nothing to type in it. On the finished note it appears only when a field under it has something in it.

Measures, under the field types, adds a field that feeds one of your measures, a rating scale or a number box for a measurement such as weight (see Tracking Progress with Measures). Add as many fields as you need.

The Cycle Symptoms checklist picked on the note, with its options Breast tenderness, Irritability, Cramping and Clots in its settings on the right

Step 6: Add default text (optional)

Pick a rich-text field and type under Default text to pre-fill it whenever a new consultation starts — a standard diet and lifestyle paragraph, say. You can edit or delete it during the consultation, and the note in the editor shows it in the field's box. Tick boxes and diagrams have no default text.

The settings of the Diet & Lifestyle field, with a paragraph of advice under Default text

Step 7: Save

Click "Save Template" in the bar under the note. Until you do, the bar says Unsaved changes, and Cancel leaves without saving.

In a practice with more than one practitioner, owners and admins also see Availability in the template's details. Keep personal means only you can use it; Share across business makes it available to everyone at your practice. Only owners and admins can edit a shared template.

The Availability options on a template: Keep personal, only you can use this template, and Share across business, everyone at your business can use this template

Step 8: Use it

In a consultation, choose your template from Template: at the top right of the note.

The Template picker at the top right of a consultation note, set to Fertility Initial

To have it open automatically, set it as the Default Consultation Template on an appointment type — see Step 4 of Setting Up Your Calendar.

Retiring a template

Click "Archive" on a template you no longer use. It leaves the template picker for new consultations, and every consultation already written with it keeps it. Archived templates sit at the bottom of the list with a Restore button. The × deletes a template outright, and only works on one that no consultation has used.

Tips:

Changing a template doesn't restructure notes already written with it.