Default templates: what new practitioners get vs what they actually use

1SOAP is the universal note, and we don’t always provide it

SOAP ranks #1 or #2 by usage in all seven analyzed profession groups. DAP is the clear second pattern, top 20 in six of seven groups. Yet five professions get no SOAP template in their defaults, and fourteen get no DAP.

Professions whose defaults include no SOAP note. In usage, coaching’s group has SOAP at #1 across 133 workspaces; social work sits in mental health where SOAP leads with 607.

2Defaults are paperwork, usage is notes

Personal Training ships 18 templates and not one is a note. Coaching ships 26 with a single note. Production runs the other way: the most‑used templates in every analyzed group are daily documentation notes such as SOAP and DAP, wrapped by a thin layer of intake and consent forms.

Where template‑linked note volume sits, by profession group:

Seven groups were analyzed; the two unknown buckets (no profession set, no workspace profile) are combined here. All others is mostly coaching workspaces.

3Psychiatry has the weakest set in the file

14 templates, no SOAP, no DAP, and its only assessment is a lab slip. The psychiatry‑specific follow‑up notes cover the progress‑note job, but GAD‑7 and PHQ‑9 sit at #6 and #7 in mental health usage, in roughly 345 workspaces each, and every other mental health profession gets them by default. Psychiatry does not.

4Allied health wants discipline‑specific SOAP

The allied health top 20 is full of self‑built OT, PT and speech SOAP variants. One OT’s customized SOAP logged 1,261 notes on its own. Acupuncture and chiropractic already get discipline SOAPs in their defaults; OT, PT and SLP get the generic one or nothing. Practitioners are building what we could be shipping.

5Some near‑universal defaults never chart in usage

Three testimonial release forms ship to 19 of 20 professions and a minor software‑use consent ships to 18. None of them appear in any group’s top 20 during the ten‑week window. Spanish variants ship inconsistently: a Spanish release form goes to personal trainers and massage therapists, while Psychiatry gets no Spanish forms at all. Meanwhile 93 of the 179 distinct templates ship to exactly one profession.

One caveat, so we don’t overclaim: one‑time forms naturally log fewer notes than daily notes, so absence from a top 20 is a weaker signal for consent forms than for notes. But privacy notices and card authorizations still chart in every group; these never do. Treat the removals as a strong hypothesis, not a proven fact.

Two horizons are in play. A larger rethink of the whole new‑customer template experience is being pitched separately: a curated starter set of roughly ten templates, a guided first visit to the Templates page, and an import path for switchers. This page is the near‑term piece. Most of it is a pure config change to the existing per‑profession sets; the only content work is three new SOAP variants and two audits. The two are compatible; shipping this first also makes the defaults a cleaner baseline for the redesign.

Approve now: moves 1, 2, 4 and 5 as a single config change to the default sets. Growth hands engineering the machine‑readable spec below; no product surface changes.

Follow up: move 3 (three SOAP variants) gated on the custom‑variant content parse and a clinical review, plus the two audits in move 6.

Measure: compare template usage per active workspace for post‑change signups against the current baseline via the note‑to‑template link, once the next cohort has a comparable window of data.