How do I use Advanced templates to customize my records?

Overview of Advanced Templates

Building on the familiar functionality of Standard and Custom templates, Advanced templates offer unique features that allow for more detailed and specific customization.

Just like with our other templates, Advanced templates enable you to generate comprehensive medical records from your audio recordings and uploaded PDFs. If you’re new to the record generation process, we recommend starting with the article How do I create a medical record from an audio recording? before diving in.

This article will help familiarize you with everything you need to know to use Advanced templates effectively.

Advanced Template Terminology

Advanced templates use specific terminology, and understanding these terms will help make sure get the most out of these templates.

Element	Elements are the basic units of the Advanced Template. They represent a very specific part of the medical record on a granular level. For example, any information related to current medications might be an element in your patient history, or information related to the patient's eyes might be an element in your physical exam. Elements contain both a label and content.
Label	Label is the term we use to represent the word or phrase that acts as a placeholder for a given element within the template. Using the same examples above, the label might be "Current Medications:", where as the content following that label would contain all of the information about those medications.
Subsection	Elements are grouped into sub-sections, along with similar elements. Some sub-sections will contain many elements, whereas others might only contain one. For example, "Vitals" and "Physical Exam" might be two sub-sections within the Objective Section of your record
Section	Sections are the largest groups within these templates, and they will contain one or more sub-sections. The basic sections for a typical SOAP record would be Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan.
Header	Headers are essentially the "title" of different sections and sub-sections within the record

Locating and Using Advanced Templates

Advanced templates can be found anywhere you view your Standard and Custom templates, and they are marked with a special "Advanced" badge.

Locating Advanced Templates for Editing Purposes

First, click My Account > Templates from either the web version or mobile version of CoVet.

Once you arrive on the Templates page, you'll see a list of all templates in your account. If you haven't already, please check out our article on how to organize your templates as it will help make the ones that are important to you more visible here.

Also, if you'd like to view only the Advanced templates you can do so by hitting the filter icon on the right, and then clicking on the "Advanced" badge.

Selecting Advanced Templates When Generating a Record

To generate a record using an Advanced template you follow the same basic workflow that you would while using any Standard or Custom template. For a full overview of that process, please check out this article.

Advanced templates will automatically appear in the list of available templates, with the most recently used ones at the top. To view only Advanced templates, you can use the filter button as pictured in the Locating Advanced Templates for Editing Purposes section directly above this one.

Customizing Advanced Templates

You can customize Advance templates in many ways, just keep reading below to explore all of your options.

When you arrive at any Advanced template builder screen it will look like this:

Use the drop down arrows on the right hand side of each sections to view what each section contains - doing this will reveal any sub-sections and elements contained in that particular section.

Settings That Affect the Entire Template

There are four icons at the top of the page, immediately to the right of the template name that allow you to change settings for the entire template.

	The star icon allows you to favourite this template. Check out more about this feature in our article about organizing your templates.
	The page icon allows you to preview what your Advanced template will look like with all of the customizations you've just made.
	The gear icon reveals the additional template options pictured below:

Personalize - This allows you to type additional instructions that CoVet will apply to the entire template, but are not able to achieve the editing tools in the Advanced template builder.

The functionality of the Personalize feature is exactly the same for Advanced templates as it is for Standard templates, but the feature is located in a slightly area.

For more on Personalization, and where to locate the feature on Standard templates please visit this article.

Enable/Disable Default Normals - Use this button to toggle on or off the feature where CoVet inserts pre-set default normal text after a specific label in the absence of contradictory or additive information. This button simply turns the feature on, or off, but keep in mind you can actually modify the specific default normal text - see the Modifying Elements section for more details.

Enable/Disable Bold Abnormals - Use this button to toggle on or off the feature where CoVet automatically bolds anything in the Objective section of Advanced SOAP templates that differs from the default normal text. This really helps those important parts of the physical exam stand out!

Reset Entire Template - Click this button to reset everything in the template to default settings. Read more about this in the Resetting Something You Have Modified section below.

Press to Hide/Show Template - This affects how this particular template appears in anywhere you view templates in CoVet. Check out this article for more on how to organize your templates.

Set As Default Template/Current Default Template - This allows you to mark or unmark this specific template as your default template. Read more about how this helps set up a handy short cut here.

Lastly, the question mark icon will open a window with some helpful hints and tips... but you won't need that because you're reading this article, right? 😉

On top of that, the question mark icon also gives you access to the "Suggest Element" button where you can let us know about other elements you'd like us to add to the Advanced template builder - we're always looking to improve!

Rearranging the Order of Sections, Subsections and Elements

You can use the Advanced template builders easy drag-and-drop interface to rearrange pretty much everything in the template so everything appears in the order you prefer for your final report.

To move anything, look for the icon composed of two horizontal lines (looks like an equals sign) towards the right side of the page:

Click and hold that icon, and you'll be able to drag the associated section, subsection or element up or down the change the order in your template.

There are actually 3 levels of these icons - the image below should help guide you to which icon moves what. Better yet, try experimenting - you can always move things back!

Modifying Elements

You can edit each individual element within an Advanced template in multiple ways. To start this process, click the down arrow on the right hand side of any section within the template - this will expand the section to reveal subsections and individual elements.

When you hover over any given element, you'll see an two icons appear

The blue toggle on the left will hide or reveal that particular element in your final reports. Keep in mind, this hides both the label and any associated content for the element. Don't need a line about Muscle Condition score in your final reports? Hide it using this feature. Alternatively use it to reveal elements you like that some other veterinarians may not use.

Some elements are hidden by default as they are less commonly used. Don't forget to look through the Advanced template you use the most to check and see if there's anything you want to unhide in order to add it to your record - it's as easy as clicking that toggle!

Clicking the pencil icon to the right of the blue toggle will open up a new editing menu that looks like this, and it contains several features:

Label - Changing the text here affects how the element appears in your final record. Not that you cannot change the actual element name at the top of the screen, but if you change a label from "Eyes:" to "Ophtho:", for example, only "Ophtho:" will appear in your final reports.

As the interface calls out, the separator (e.g. the ":") isn't included by default. If you'd like a separator or any sort (feel free to substitute "-", or anything else) you need to include it here.

Remove entire line in final report if there is no associated content - This hides the element in question from your record, but only under very specific conditions. When this box is checked, the element will continue to appear in your final records if there is any associated content, whether that content be something you said during your consultation, or default normal text. That being said, when neither relevant content nor default normal text are present, this element will be hidden, which makes for a nice concise record that automatically shortens when some information is not touched on.

Default normal - This is where you can edit the default normal text that will appear after a label in the absence of contradictory or additive information. CoVet will always add relevant content when available, but editing here allows you to get the exact wording you want when a specific element isn't mentioned during your consultation.

More on your ability to edit both labels and default normal text this using bold, italics or headings here.

Modifying Subsections (and Subsection Headers)

Hover in the area of any subsection and a pencil icon will appear.

The following editing tools appear when you click that pencil icon:

Name - Entering a name will give this subsection a title, or "header" that will appear in your final reports. By default, these are blank, but if you'd like "Vitals" above your vital section and "Physical Exam" above the physical exam this is the place to enter them. More on your ability to edit this using bold, italics or headings here.

# of blank lines between elements - This controls the number of spaces or blank lines that will appear between elements within that subsection.

Modifying Sections (and Section Headers)

Hover in the area of any section to reveal two icons on the right. The "Preview" icon will give you a visual preview of that section with it's current set-up when clicked.

Alternatively, click the "Edit" pencil icon to reveal the following editing tools:

Name - This allows you to rename the header that appears above each section in your final report. More on your ability to edit this using bold, italics or headings here.

These section headers do not appear when you are copying section by section - they only appear when you use the "Copy All" function, and are there to visually separate and identify the sections when you're pasting everything at once.

# of blank lines between subsections - This controls the number of spaces or blank lines that will appear between subsections within that section.

Using Rich Text (i.e. Bold, Italicize and Headings)

Whether you are modifying an element, a subsection or a section, you can use rich text to get the formatting options you want.

This functions similar to formatting features you are used to in other software like MS Word and Google Docs. Just highlight the text in question and click B to bold (or unbold) it, and I to italicize (or un-italicize) it.

Also, don't miss the drop down arrow next to the word "Normal". It will allow you to chose from normal text and 3 different sizes of headings, which effective changes your font size for the highlighted text. Heading 1 is the largest font size, and Normal text is the smallest.

Please note that there is a very important setting under My Account > Profile & Settings which affects the behaviour of text that is copied out of CoVet and pasted into another software.

This setting allows you to determine the default behavior of all copy buttons (i.e. both "Copy All" and "Copy" by section buttons) within CoVet.

Rich Text	Rich text looks like this
Markdown Text	Markdown text looks like this
Plain Text	Plain text looks like this

Rich text is the option that is set by default, so no need to do anything if you like this setting. Note that even when you copy in rich text from CoVet, this formatting will only work if the destination software is capable of accepting and displaying rich text. This ability will vary from program to program.

Markdown text might be useful for people using certain practice management software like ezyVet, which recognizes markdown and automatically formats it into rich text. When using the Markdown option in CoVet, it will automatically insert the appropriate markdown characters when copied even though what you are viewing in the CoVet editor appears as rich text.

Plain text is, well, plain. Still gets the job done though!

Resetting Something You Have Modified

Any time you modify a section, subsection or element you'll notice an icon appear next to it flagging that a change has been made.

The icon is there to let you know the item in question has been customized. Should you ever want to reset the section, subsection or element to the way it appears with CoVet's default settings, simply click the reset or clock icon and voilà. You're ready to start fresh!

There is also an option to reset the entire template (i.e. change all sections, subsections and elements back to their default settings) with a single click. You can find that option under the More template options section by clicking on the gear icon at the top of the page.

FAQ About Advanced Templates

The Advanced templates don't contain an element I would like added to my reports. How do I achieve this?

First off, we'd love to hear from you - our goal is to add more and more elements to the Advanced templates over time to make them increasingly flexible. Please use the "Suggest Element" option to let us know! You can find this option by clicking on the question mark icon to the right of the template name, and then clicking "Suggest Element" at the bottom of the new window that appears.

In the meantime, you can still use the Personalize feature to add elements we don't already include in the builder. Check out the Settings That Affect the Entire Template section of this article for more details on where to access this. This other article on Personalization as it relates to Standard templates also gives some concrete examples of text you can use for these Personalization instructions.