Patient Context Overview

What patient context does

When you generate a note for a patient, PatientNotes can optionally add three extra pieces of background to the note's context — without you having to paste or re-dictate anything each visit:

1. The patient's structured profile— Medical History, Medications, Allergies and Notes that you've typed or dictated once.
2. Text from uploaded documents — intake forms, scanned charts, prior consult letters, lab printouts, advance directives. Both images and PDFs are supported.
3. The previous visit's note — used as continuity reference for follow-ups, weekly nursing-home rounds, chronic-care, and physical therapy progress.

Each of the three is gated by its own toggle on the patient's page. Your existing notes are not affected by any of this until you switch one of the toggles on.

Where to find it in the app

There are two places to manage a patient's context:

From the quick-edit modal

Click any patient's name — from the patient list, the recording screen, or anywhere their name appears as a link. The patient profile modal opens with:

• Patient identifier
• Additional patient context (the freeform notes textarea)
• A Documents dropzone for uploads
• A Note generation card with the three toggles

The modal is the fastest path when you just want to upload a form or flip a toggle in the middle of a session.

From the full patient detail page

Open /patients/[id]directly, click the “View full profile” link inside the modal, or just click a patient row in the patient list. The page shows the same sections plus the structured Medical History, Medications, Allergies, Notes and Context textareas — useful when you want to dictate background in detail or review extracted text from previous uploads.

Uploading documents

Drag-and-drop into the Documents dropzone, or click to browse. Each file is uploaded immediately, then read in the background. A status pill on each row tells you where it stands:

• Pending — uploaded, queued for processing.
• Processing — text is being extracted right now.
• Ready — extraction finished; the document is now available for future notes.
• Failed— something went wrong. You'll see the reason on the row; common causes are damaged files, unreadable PDFs without embedded text, or files over the size limit. Re-upload after fixing the underlying file.

Supported formats and limits

• Images: PNG, JPG, GIF, WEBP, BMP
• Documents: PDF (multi-page; up to 20 pages per file)
• Maximum file size: 25 MB per file
• No limit on the number of documents per patient

What gets extracted

The processing step pulls clinical content from each document: medications and doses, diagnoses, allergies, prior surgeries, lab values, vitals, clinical observations, and any plain text on the page.

Patient identifiers (name, date of birth, phone, email) are intentionally not captured into the extracted text — the patient record itself is already the source of truth for those, and keeping demographics out of extracted text reduces the amount of personal information stored in additional places.

Reviewing and deleting

Once a document is Ready, click the chevron on its row to expand and read the extracted text. If anything looks wrong, you can:

• Delete the document with the trash icon — removes both the file and any extracted text. This is irreversible.
• Pause AI useby turning the “Include uploaded documents in notes” toggle off — keeps the file on record for reference but stops it being included in note prompts. You can flip the toggle back on at any time.

The three note-generation toggles

Each toggle gates one of the three context streams independently. You can mix and match — for example, include the patient's structured profile but not the prior visit, or vice versa.

Include full profile in notes

When on, the Medical History, Medications, Allergies and Notes fields are referenced when generating any note for this patient.

• Default: Off — your prior notes are not affected unless you switch this on.
• Best for: chronic-care patients, complex polypharmacy, geriatric and pediatric workflows where the same background applies visit after visit.

Include uploaded documents in notes

When on, the extracted text from every “Ready” document on this patient is referenced when generating notes. Pending or failed documents are ignored.

• Default: On — uploading a document signals intent to use it. If you ever want to keep files on record without referencing them, turn this off without deleting anything.
• Best for:patients who came in with a paper intake form, patients transferring care with prior chart printouts, anyone who's given you lab printouts or imaging summaries you want the AI aware of.

Include previous visit in notes

When on, the most recent generated note for this patient is referenced as continuity context for the next note — the AI is instructed to use it for context awareness, not to copy from it.

• Default: Off.
• Best for:weekly nursing-home rounds, physical therapy progress notes, chronic-pain follow-ups, post-op visits, anywhere the preceding visit's plan is the starting point for the next one.

How it works across visits

Once a patient's profile fields are filled in, their documents are uploaded, and the toggles are set the way you want, every subsequent visit for that patient automatically inherits the configuration. You don't have to do anything special at the start of a visit:

1. Create a visit and link it to the patient (or pick an existing patient when starting the session).
2. Record as usual.
3. Generate the note. Whichever context streams the patient has enabled flow into the note prompt automatically.

You can change the toggles for that patient any time — the change applies to the next note generated, not retroactively.

Privacy & deletion

• Documents and profile data are scoped to a single patient inside your practice. They are never used to generate notes for any other patient or any other practice.
• Deleting a patient deletes their documents and extracted text. Deleting a single document removes it and its extracted text.
• Turning a toggle off stops referencing that stream in future notes — the underlying data is preserved and the toggle can be turned back on at any time.

Frequently asked questions

Will this change notes for patients I already have?

No. The Include profile and Include previous visit toggles default to off for every patient. The Include documents toggle defaults to on but only matters once you upload a document — and existing patients have none. Your prior notes will not be affected until you actively enable one of the context streams.

Can I upload more than one document per patient?

Yes. Upload as many as you like. When the Include documents toggle is on, the extracted text from every Ready document on the patient is included in note generation, combined together with a header for each file. To keep prompt size reasonable, the combined text is capped at a generous limit; if you have many long documents you may want to delete older ones that are no longer relevant.

Does it read handwritten intake forms?

Yes — handwritten content is readable as long as the writing is reasonably neat and the photo is clear. Mixed printed-and-handwritten forms (printed labels with handwritten answers) work well. If a particular form comes back with a lot of gaps, try a sharper photo or scanning at a higher resolution.

My PDF has more than 20 pages — what should I do?

Split it into separate files or only upload the pages you actually need. Most clinical PDFs (intake forms, med-rec summaries, prior consult letters) are well under that limit. The page cap is there to keep processing fast and predictable.

Can I edit the extracted text?

Not directly. The extracted text on a document is a snapshot of what was read off the file. If something is wrong, the best workflow is to delete the document, fix the underlying file (or upload a clearer version), and re-upload. For ad-hoc corrections, the Medical History / Medications / Allergies / Notes / Context textareas on the patient page are fully editable.