SMARText

Overview 

Simply put, SMARText is a Lego set for medical information. Just like the Lego's of your youth, SMARText has many different pieces that can be put together in almost limitless ways. The 'pieces' in SMARText are called types and they define what the SMARText item contains/represents. Some popular types are Medication, Assessment, Order, text snippet (Free Text and Structured) and lists. Staying with our Legos analology, you can stick multiple SMARText items together to produce a new and useful structure. For example, a SMARText medication item contains many other SMARText items: Start Date, End Date, Dose, Frequency etc.

In order to build your SOAP Note with the SMARText 'legos' you would normally utilize many different pieces. You might use a few free text snippets to fill in the Subjective, a large Objective SMARText item that contains many pick lists (also SMARText) to choose exam values, an assessment, a few medications and an order or two. All of these pices will snap togthether to produce a clean, structured detailed SOAP Note that is unique to your practice.

The only thing you can't do with the SMARText 'legos' is blow them up with firecrackers !

The Details

Here we will cover the following:

• Explain what SMARText is and does.
• Explain why plain typed or written documentation is a type of illiteracy.
• Explain what a docutainer is.
• Explain the difference between free text and structured text.
• Visualize how SMARText appears in final documentation if it is printed.
• Explain what the purpose of the “brackets” are for in SMARText.
• Show how is SMARText more flexible than just about any type of medical documentation to date.
• What makes documentation readable by computers and information systems.
• What makes the pick lists created with SMARText different from pick lists in other systems.
• Explain how SMARText is revolutionary.

SMARText is a revolutionary approach to medical documentation. To date, nothing similiar to it exists in other products. To make a long story short, it makes the notion of a simple document containing only words as obsolete. A document in SOAPware is now a container that can contain not just groups of typed letters (i.e. words), but can contain a near infinite number of different pieces of information that the computer can read and use. These pieces of information could even be combinations of images, photographs, videos, or audio files. Because what looks like a document in SOAPware is now actually a container for all types of information, we had to coin a new word for a totally new entity that is a document container... docutainer. Many of these pieces of information appear very much as typed, free text would appear, however SMARText is much more than free text.

Take a look at the image, above. At the top of the image one can see the top of a docutainer in SOAPware for an encounter note. In the lower part of the image is a preview showing how it would appear if turned into a printed document. Even though it looks like simple, typed information in the printed document, it is much, much more.

For example, in most other systems, the computer has no means of knowing what is the subjective information unless it is entered into a separate field or box. In the image above, we have made the brackets visible that the computer can now use to identify where the subjective information begins and ends. Information systems simply can't create these boundaries of information within a single document as the human mind can do. SMARText bridges the world of the human mind and information technology. Most other systems force documentation to be created by clicking through dozens of fields or pick lists with little ability for flexibility or free text. With SMARText, everything can be either free text, or structured text, or any combination, and it can be created at any time starting at any point within the documentation. There is complete flexibility!

The "Nausea" in the SOAPware encounter docutainer above was actually selected from a pick list and was not typed. If it had been typed, then there would not be a means for the computer or information systems to know what nausea is other than a string of 6 letters. To the computer, desaan and nausea are indistinguishable. In this example, Nausea is actually a SMARText item that the computer and other systems can identify. This is because, in the background, it is actually an object or chunk of information associated with machine-readable classification system of codes. On the screen, you see "Nausea" and behind the scene, the computer can understand that this patient had nausea and can report this using at least 8 different coding systems.

So, the difference of "Nausea" typed into most systems and "Nausea" as a SMARText item is profound. It is the same difference as comparing an illiterate individual to one who can read and speak at least 8 different languages. We are moving clinicians out of their information system illiteracy via SMARText!

As a user, you never need to know or deal with all the languages your medical records can speak. All of that is hidden during the normal, daily process of creating documentation.

When SOAPware users do prefer to use structured or coded items in their documentation, the options for pick lists to be "smarter" is far greater than with most legacy systems with their fixed inflexibility. SOAPware users can create, on the fly, what typically takes months and thousands of dollars in most systems.

Additionally, SMARText items can contain other SMARText items. Without getting really geeky at this point, this is a bit difficult to explain.  In a nutshell, it makes it possible for the items you use in documentation (that appear to be simple words) to have underlying relationships to the other items in the medical record. The "words" you use in your documentation actually know what they are and what their relationship is to everything else in your entire chart rack. This is truly revolutionary, and it will take some time and experience to comprehend the full implications.

Getting to work

Now that we've covered the 'why' of SMARText it is time to delve into the 'how'. IN the table of contents below you will find links to everything we have related to SMARText.

It's suggested that you work throught he first 4 steps, in order, before continuing on.