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OutSmart Guide

Basic Charting

Basic Charting in OutSmart is the simplest way to take notes during a patient visit. The chart is laid out as four free-form sections — Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan — that you can type into directly. There’s no setup, no template, no fields to fill in. Open the chart, type your notes, save, and lock when you’re done.

Basic Charting is the right fit when:

  • You’re new to OutSmart and learning your way around charting.
  • Your charting style is conversational prose, not structured data.
  • You want to move fast and don’t need OutSmart to track diagnoses, products, or measurements in a structured way.

When you’re ready to add structured features — diagnoses that flow into reports, product recommendations that build a treatment plan, blends that move inventory, repeating templates that save typing — see PRO Charting.

The Four Basic Sections

A Basic chart is a single chart screen with four labelled areas:

SectionWhat goes here
SubjectiveWhat the patient tells you — chief complaint, history, symptoms, lifestyle context. The patient’s account of why they’re in.
ObjectiveWhat you observe or measure — exam findings, vital signs, lab values, anything you saw or recorded yourself.
AssessmentYour interpretation — working impression, differential, clinical reasoning that connects the subjective and objective to a plan.
PlanWhat you recommend — treatments, follow-up, products to take, referrals, education for the patient. Anything you type in the Plan section also shows up on the printed Treatment Plan you can hand to the patient.

Each section accepts free-form text and basic formatting. Type as much or as little as the visit calls for; sections you don’t use stay empty without affecting the chart.

Printing a Treatment Plan from a Basic Chart

In Basic Charting, the Plan section is the source of the patient’s printed Treatment Plan. Whatever you type into Plan appears on the print view; sections other than Plan are skipped.

  1. Write the treatment plan in the Plan section of the chart.
  2. Click the Print Treatment Plan button at the top of the chart.

The print view opens. Hand the printout to the patient, save it as a PDF, or print to your office printer.

PRO Charting offers a more structured Treatment Plan that pulls in prescriptions, blends, and product recommendations automatically. If you’re using PRO sections for products, the Treatment Plan composes itself from those entries. See Creating a Patient Treatment Plan.

When to Move to PRO Charting

Basic Charting handles the work for most simple visits, but you’ll outgrow it as you start needing:

  • Structured diagnoses that appear on invoices and feed Patient Reports
  • Product, supplement, and prescription recommendations that print labels, generate Rx sheets, and flow into the Express Checkout invoice
  • Blends and recipes that consume ingredient inventory and produce billable products
  • Smart Templates that re-apply a common section layout without retyping
  • Headings and Smart Lists for re-usable checkbox-style fields
  • Measurements that track vitals over time

You can mix and match. A single chart can have Basic free-form sections and PRO sections side by side. Most practitioners start with Basic, then add PRO sections one feature at a time as their charting style develops.

Troubleshooting

There are two places you can capture informed consent in a chart:

  • The Informed Consent area at the top of the chart interface — a dedicated field that’s always available, before you add any sections.
  • The Informed Consent section — an addable section you place on the Plan page. To add it, click the green +P button just above the chart index on the left side of the page, then choose Informed Consent from the menu of available sections.

Both options support Smart Lists — saved checklists you can reuse across charts to speed up consent documentation. Pick whichever placement fits your charting flow; both feed into the audit trail the same way.