Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Why Disclaimers Don’t Belong in Patient Charts and What They Say About Your Culture of Care

Urgent Message: Replace vague, defensive disclaimers in patient charts with clear, specific documentation and evidence-based communication to strengthen trust and demonstrate a culture of quality care. Alan A. Ayers, MBA, MAcc Keywords: EHR templates; smart phrases; culture; disclaimers; patient charts; malpractice Disclaimers are creeping into urgent care documentation. Many providers have grown accustomed to including boilerplate language such as “comfort measures were reviewed,” “patient verbalized understanding,” or “dictated but not read.” These lines are often …

Presenting Conditions Documented in Patient Charts at U.S. Urgent Care Centers in 2014

Data from the 2014 Urgent Care Chart Survey of 1,778,075 blinded patient visits to more than 800 different urgent care clinics, conducted by the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, show that the top 3 conditions that patients reported at presentation were cough (10.9% of visits), sore throat (10.4% of visits), and pain of some kind (7.7% of visits). The survey’s methodology and data abstraction forms were initially designed in 2008 by researcher Robin M. Weinick, …

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