Share Clinical Encounter Notes with Patients
Share Encounter Note is live — pick what to include, add a Personal Message, and send a clean PDF that’s also saved to the patient’s documents.
Your patients keep asking the same thing: “Can you send me a copy of what we covered today?” Until now the honest answer was a mix of copy-pasting into a message, exporting the whole signed note, or telling them to log into the portal and find it themselves. None of those felt great.
Share Encounter Note is our answer. The function lives right where you’d expect it — on the signed note itself — and sends the patient a clean, identified PDF in about thirty seconds, straight to their HIPAA-compliant documents folder on the web or in the iPhone and Android app.
How to find the share function
Open any signed encounter note in the chart and hit the ⋮ menu in the note footer. You’ll see a new menu item:
➤ Share with patient…
That’s it. No new buttons, no new section in the sidebar — just one new line in the menu you already know. The option only shows up on signed notes — if your note’s still a draft, you won’t see it.
Pick what goes in — without rewriting anything
We knew the simplest answer would be “just send the whole note,” but most notes have at least one object that isn’t meant for the patient — an internal billing entry, coding notes, your own clinical reasoning. So the share screen shows each object in the note as its own card: a small chip telling you what kind of object it is (Transcription, Structured form, Free-text, Template), the first couple of lines, and a toggle.
Flip an entry off and it disappears from the preview on the right; the count at the bottom updates (“2 of 3 entries included”); the card dims and says “Hidden — won’t appear in the PDF.” Tap a card to expand it and read the full content before you decide.
A note on the line we drew. You can omit whole entries, but you cannot edit the text of what you include. Whatever ships goes verbatim. This is deliberate: omission is bounded and visible (“I withheld my billing object”), but rewriting the record on the way out would mean a document on practice letterhead saying something the chart doesn’t. Your Personal Message is the place for your own voice — more on that in a second.
Workflow tip: author your internal or billing content as its own object rather than mixing it into a clinical entry. That way you can cleanly leave it out when you share.
A Personal Message, if you want one
Below the entries you’ll find an optional Personal Message — to let the patient know. It’s not part of the PDF. BodySite always sends the patient a system notification when their document is ready; if you want to add your own warm “great seeing you today” on top of that, this is where it goes.
That distinction matters. The PDF stays the verbatim record; your “Hi Sarah — please start the magnesium tonight…” travels alongside the system notification, where it reads like the human message it is.
Where the PDF lands
When you confirm, here’s what happens:
- Saved to the patient’s Files & documents — so it’s there next time anyone needs to grab it.
- BodySite sends the patient a system notification that there’s a new document from you.
- Optionally, your Personal Message goes along with it — so the patient hears it in your voice too, not just ours.
If you’d rather just grab a copy for yourself — to print, to drop into a referral packet, whatever — there’s a Print / Save PDF button at the top right of the preview that produces the same clean document, no message sent.
Built so the patient can hand it off
A surprising number of these PDFs end up with a second provider — a specialist the patient is seeing next week, a covering doc, a new PCP. So the PDF carries the identifiers a receiving office actually needs to use it: your practice logo and name on the letterhead, and the patient’s name, DOB, sex, MRN, phone, email, address, in a clean demographics band beneath. If you’d rather send a lighter patient-only copy, one toggle drops it back to just name and date of visit.
What’s next
Fax to another provider is the next thing we’re building. The same flow — pick the entries, hit send — will let you skip the patient as middleman and route the same identified PDF straight to a colleague’s office. The bones are designed for it; when it ships, “Share with patient…” becomes just one option behind a single “Share…” item.
Try it
It’s live on every signed encounter note today. If you run into anything that feels off — or you’ve got a workflow this doesn’t fit yet — let us know. This is the first piece, not the last.
— The BodySite team