Setting Up Care Plan Templates

What Are Care Plans in Doctora?

Care plans are the clinical action items tied to each diagnosis in your encounter---things like "Patient education regarding today's findings," "Provided updated spectacle Rx," or "Dispensed trial contact lenses. Return in 1 week for recheck." Every ICD-10 code in a Doctora encounter can have one or more care plan entries attached to it, and the AI generates these automatically based on your exam findings and dictation.

The goal is to eliminate repetitive typing. Instead of writing the same follow-up instructions for every myopia patient, Doctora learns what you typically write and suggests it for you.

How Care Plan Suggestions Work

When Doctora generates ICD-10 codes for an encounter, it also produces care plan recommendations for each diagnosis. The AI draws from three sources, in priority order:

1. Pinned plans. Plans you have explicitly pinned for a diagnosis family always appear first. These are your "always suggest this" items.
2. Learned plans. Plans Doctora has observed you keeping across previous encounters. Every time you save an encounter with care plans, Doctora records which plans you actually used---not just what the AI suggested---and feeds that history back into future suggestions.
3. Library plans. A set of common optometric care plan templates (e.g., "Emphasized importance of annual eye exams," "Call office immediately should any new pain, redness, blur or problems occur"). These serve as a starting point before you build up your own history.

The AI can also generate custom care plans on the fly when your dictation mentions a specific follow-up action, medication, or test that does not match anything in the library. These appear with a "custom" label so you can distinguish them from library selections.

Care Plan History

Care plan history is the mechanism that makes suggestions personal. Doctora tracks which care plans you actually use for each diagnosis family and how often, then ranks future suggestions by frequency.

How it gets built:

• Learning from encounters. Every time you finalize an encounter, Doctora records the care plans you kept (and discards any containing patient-specific clinical values like Rx powers or VA measurements, since those are not reusable).
• EHR history extraction. For RevolutionEHR users, Doctora can scan up to 18 months of your past encounters to bootstrap your care plan history. This runs as a background job through the Chrome extension---it reads each encounter's diagnoses and associated care plans from your EHR, batches them to the server, and derives per-family frequency data. The extraction is resumable: if the browser closes mid-extraction, it picks up where it left off on the next run.

EHR availability note: Automated care plan history extraction is currently available for RevolutionEHR. If your practice uses CrystalPM or OfficeMate, you can still configure care plans manually---pinning plans, editing suggestions, and building history organically through encounters all work regardless of EHR system.

History is stored per provider, so each doctor in a multi-provider practice gets personalized suggestions based on their own patterns.

Multi-Provider Practices

In practices with multiple providers, Doctora maintains both individual and practice-wide care plan data:

• Provider history drives your personal suggestions, ranked by your own usage frequency.
• Practice aggregate supplements your suggestions with plans that other providers in your practice use frequently. These appear with a "practice" label so you can tell them apart from your own history. Plans used by more providers are ranked higher, surfacing consensus care plans across the group.

This means a new provider joining an established practice immediately benefits from the team's collective care plan patterns, even before building their own history.

Pinning Care Plans

If there is a care plan you always want suggested for a particular diagnosis family, you can pin it. Pinned plans:

• Always appear at the top of the suggestion list for that family, regardless of frequency.
• Are never capped or pushed out by higher-frequency plans.
• Record which ICD-10 code you were viewing when you pinned them, so Doctora can refine code-level ranking over time.

You can pin or unpin plans directly from the care plan editor in any encounter by clicking the pin icon next to a suggestion.

Syncing Care Plan Templates from Your EHR

If your EHR supports it, Doctora can sync care plan templates directly. In the EHR Sync panel (accessible from Settings), look for the "Care Plan Templates" card. Clicking "Sync Care Plans" pulls the latest templates from your EHR and stores them for use in future encounters. These synced templates replace the default library, so your AI suggestions match the language your practice already uses.

Disabling Default Care Plans

Some doctors prefer to write every care plan from scratch rather than selecting from a predefined list. You can disable the default care plan library in your preferences:

• When disabled, the AI will not reference the built-in template library or any synced EHR templates. Instead, it generates only custom care plans based on what it hears in your dictation.
• Your care plan history and pinned plans still apply---disabling defaults only removes the predefined library from the AI's selection pool.
• This setting is per provider, so it does not affect other doctors in your practice.

You can toggle this from the encounter editor or ask your admin to set it from the provider preferences panel.

Tips for Effective Care Plans

• Let it learn. The more encounters you run, the better your suggestions get. Doctora tracks frequency per diagnosis family, so after a few dozen encounters your most-used plans rise to the top automatically.
• Pin your essentials. If there is a plan you use for virtually every patient in a diagnosis family, pin it so you never have to scroll for it.
• Edit before saving. The AI sometimes generates plans that are close but not quite right. Editing them before saving teaches Doctora your preferred phrasing for next time.
• Run the history extraction. If you are on RevolutionEHR and have months of existing encounters, running the care plan history extraction from the EHR Sync panel gives you a strong starting baseline without waiting for organic learning.
• Review practice suggestions. In a multi-provider practice, keep an eye on plans labeled "practice"---they surface care plans your colleagues use that you might want to adopt.