Guide

Creating Encounter Notes

Document patient visits efficiently with structured notes, AI-powered dictation, and automated data extraction.

Starting a Session

Open a clinical session to create a complete, timestamped record of the patient encounter.

1

Open the patient record

Find the patient from your appointment list or search by name, phone number, or patient ID. Click on the patient to open their record, then select Start Session or click on their scheduled appointment to begin.

2

Confirm the encounter type

Select the encounter type — initial consultation, follow-up, emergency, or procedure. This determines the default note template and any required fields. Cari pre-populates relevant information from the patient's last visit, including active medications, pending lab results, and outstanding action items.

Initial Consult
Follow-up
Emergency
Procedure
3

Review the patient summary

Before you begin documenting, Cari displays a clinical summary panel showing active problems, allergies (highlighted in red if severe), recent vitals trends, and current medications. This takes seconds to scan and ensures you have full context before the consultation starts.

The clinical summary panel is always visible in the sidebar during a session. You can collapse it for more screen space, but reviewing it at the start of each encounter prevents missed information.

SOAP Notes

Use the industry-standard Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan framework for consistent documentation.

Subjective

Chief complaint, history of present illness, review of systems

Objective

Physical exam findings, vitals, lab results

Assessment

Working diagnosis, differential diagnoses, ICD-10 codes

Plan

Medications, investigations, referrals, follow-up

1

Subjective

Document the patient's chief complaint, history of present illness, and review of systems in their own words. Record symptom onset, duration, severity, and any aggravating or relieving factors. Cari provides structured symptom selectors alongside free-text entry for speed.

2

Objective

Record physical examination findings and vital signs. Enter blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, weight, and height. Cari automatically calculates BMI and flags abnormal values based on age and gender norms. Examination findings can be entered as free text or using body-system checklists.

3

Assessment

Enter your clinical assessment — the working diagnosis or differential diagnoses. Search for ICD-10 codes by keyword and select the most appropriate code. Cari's AI-powered diagnosis assistant can suggest likely diagnoses based on the symptoms and findings you have documented, ranked by probability.

4

Plan

Document the treatment plan: medications prescribed, investigations ordered, referrals made, and follow-up instructions. Each element creates structured entries — a prescription generates a dispensing order, a lab request appears in the lab queue, and a follow-up creates a scheduling prompt.

All prescriptions entered in the Plan section are automatically checked for drug-drug interactions and drug-allergy conflicts before they can be finalized. Never bypass these safety alerts.

Voice Dictation & AI

Speak naturally and let AI extract clinical entities from your dictation in real time.

1

Enable the microphone

Click the microphone icon in the session toolbar to start recording. Cari uses on-device speech recognition where available and falls back to cloud transcription. The transcript appears in real time as you speak.

2

Speak naturally

Describe the encounter as you normally would — "The patient presents with a three-day history of cough and fever. Temperature 38.5. I'm prescribing amoxicillin 500mg three times daily for seven days." Cari transcribes your speech and simultaneously identifies clinical entities: symptoms, vitals, diagnoses, medications, and dosages.

Voice dictation works best in a quiet environment. If your clinic is noisy, use a headset with a directional microphone for better accuracy.

3

Stop recording

Click the microphone icon again to stop. Cari processes the full transcript and highlights all extracted entities for your review. You can also add manual entries alongside dictated content.

Reviewing Extractions

Verify AI-extracted entities before they are committed to the patient record.

1

Review extracted entities

After dictation, Cari displays a review panel with categorised extractions: vitals, symptoms, diagnoses (with suggested ICD-10 codes), medications (with dosage and frequency), and action items. Each entity is editable — click to modify, remove, or reclassify.

2

Approve or reject each item

Check the items you want to commit to the patient record and uncheck any that are incorrect. You can also add items that the AI missed. This human-in-the-loop step ensures that the structured data in the EHR is always clinician-verified.

AI extraction saves time, but clinical accuracy requires human verification. Cari never commits extracted data to the patient record without your explicit approval.

3

Commit to the record

Click Commit to write the approved entities into the patient's clinical record. Vitals are added to the vitals chart, diagnoses to the problem list, and prescriptions to the medication orders. The raw transcript is preserved as an audit trail.

You can also add vitals, diagnoses, and prescriptions manually at any point during the session without using voice dictation — use the Add Vitals, Add Diagnosis, and Add Prescription buttons in the session toolbar.