Practice Fusion · pediatrics

Template Triage

Three passes through the 57-template library — merge the duplicates, assign shortcuts, retire what a pediatrics office will never open. Do this before building any search tool: a fast search over a messy library just finds the mess faster.

57templates

2,497phrase items

1,487unique phrases

0usable shortcuts

9in-house items

Every shortcut field already contains .. and nothing else. All 57 of them, identically. The list view shows the column as blank, so this reads as Practice Fusion pre-seeding a two-dot prefix that nobody ever finished typing — the intended shortcut is presumably ..acne, and the office got a library of bare prefixes instead.

Confirm before assigning forty: open one template, type ..acne into its shortcut field, save, then try it in a note. If that fires, the prefix is Practice Fusion's own convention and the scheme below should adopt it — ..uri, ..w6m, ..otitis. The tables list the bare form, so prepend .. to every one. That prefix is also what keeps the short ones safe: om or age loose in clinical prose would be a landmine, while ..om can never occur by accident.

Pass 1

Resolve the duplicates

Six places where two entries compete for the same visit. Open both, keep the fuller one, delete the other — a picker with two identical names costs a decision every single time it opens.

Competing entries		Call
Admission H&P × 2	delete both	Inpatient admission paperwork. An outpatient pediatrics office does not write these.
Constipation × 2	keep 1	Common peds complaint — worth keeping the better of the two, then renaming.
PediatricConjunctivitis × 2	keep 1	Daily-use template. Compare and keep whichever has the fuller exam section.
AnalPainItching × 2	delete both	Adult-framed, and redundant with the hemorrhoid template that's also going.
FAILURE TO THRIVE / FTT	delete FTT	Nothing to merge — FTT is an empty shell with zero items. Keep FAILURE TO THRIVE, which has 5.
Sports PE / Sports Physical	delete Sports Physical	The in-house one is empty. Keep the stock Sports PE and build on that instead.

Pass 2

Assign shortcuts

Nothing in the library has a shortcut, which means every template is currently reached by scrolling. An hour of clicking fixes that, with no code.

One caveat now that TalkEHR is in the picture: shortcuts assigned here live inside Practice Fusion and do nothing in TalkEHR. They're still worth assigning — they pay off immediately in the EHR where most charting happens — but they are not the long-term answer. The shortcut column below doubles as the naming scheme for the cross-EHR tool, so the same key means the same template in both places.

Well-child visits — the workhorses

Fifteen age-banded exams, named on Practice Fusion's own odd ranges. Map each to the Bright Futures visit the pediatrician actually books, so the shortcut matches what they say out loud.

Current name	Shortcut	Rename to	Visit
PE Age 0-1 mos	wnb	WCC newborn	Newborn / 1 mo
PE Age 1-2 mos	w2m	WCC 2 mo	2 mo
PE Age 3-4 mos	w4m	WCC 4 mo	4 mo
PE Age 5-6 mos	w6m	WCC 6 mo	6 mo
PE Age 7-9 mos	w9m	WCC 9 mo	9 mo
PE Age 10-12 mos	w12m	WCC 12 mo	12 mo
PE Age 13-15 mos	w15m	WCC 15 mo	15 mo
PE Age 16-23 mos	w18m	WCC 18 mo	18 mo
PE Age 2 yrs	w2y	WCC 2 yr	24 mo
PE Age 3 yrs	w3y	WCC 3 yr	3 yr
PE Age 4-5 yrs	w4y	WCC 4-5 yr	4 & 5 yr
PE Age 6-8 yrs	w6y	WCC 6-8 yr	6–8 yr
PE Age 9-12 yrs	w9y	WCC 9-12 yr	9–12 yr
PE Age 13-16 yrs	w13y	WCC 13-16 yr	Adolescent
PE Age 17-18 yrs	w17y	WCC 17-18 yr	Transition

Gap worth noting: there is no 30-month template, and the 16–23 month band has to cover both the 18-month visit and any late 15-month catch-up. Both are candidates for the first templates you write from scratch.

Sick visits & chronic care

Current name	Shortcut	Rename to
Pediatric URI	uri	URI
PediatricOtitisMedia	otitis	Otitis media
AGE	gastro	Gastroenteritis, acute
PediatricConjunctivitis	conj	Conjunctivitis
Asthma,COPD	asthma	Asthma
AllergicRhinitis	rhinitis	Allergic rhinitis
Constipation	constip	Constipation
Diarrhea	diarrhea	Diarrhea
NauseaVomiting	emesis	Nausea & vomiting
AbdominalPain	abdpain	Abdominal pain
Headache	headache	Headache
ENT:Otalgia	earpain	Ear pain
ENT:ThroatDiscomfort	throat	Sore throat
URI,bronchitis,sinusitis,OM,pharyngitis	resp	Respiratory, combined
EPISTAXIS	epistax	Epistaxis
Acne	acne	Acne
Dermatitis	derm	Dermatitis
TINEA	tinea	Tinea
Warts	warts	Warts
FTT (merged)	ftt	Failure to thrive
Circumcision	circ	Circumcision
Sports Physical (merged)	sports	Sports physical
DYSMANORRHEA	dysmen	Dysmenorrhea
GERD	gerd	GERD / reflux
_ROS	ros	Review of systems
_WellnessExam	wellness	Wellness exam, general

Pass 3

Retire the adult templates

Fifty of the 57 are stock Practice Fusion templates written for general adult primary care. Deleting the ones a pediatrician will never open shortens every scroll for the ones they will. Archive rather than delete if Practice Fusion offers it.

	Template	Why it goes
	MedicareAnnualWellnessExam	Medicare. No pediatric patient is eligible.
	MedicareIntroExam	Same.
	DiabetesHTNHyperlipidemia	Adult metabolic bundle. Pediatric T1D needs its own template, not this.
	ARTHRITIS	In-house and empty — zero items. Nothing is lost by deleting it.
	EPISTAXIS, TINEA	Also in-house and empty. Both are worth writing; neither exists yet.
	SK/AK/Sq Cancer	Actinic keratosis and squamous cell carcinoma. Not a pediatric concern.
	Hemmorhoids,AnalFissure	Adult-framed; peds fissures are covered by the constipation template.
	Restless Leg Syndrome	Real in children but rare. Delete unless this office sees it.
	SwallowingDifficulty	Adult dysphagia workup. Peds feeding problems look nothing like this.
	Admission H&P × 2	Already handled in pass 1.
	AnalPainItching × 2	Already handled in pass 1.

Then

What this sets up

Capture the content. Every template has a stable UUID and edit URL, so the ~34 surviving bodies can be pulled in one scripted pass. Do it after triage, not before.
Own the templates outside both EHRs. Because charting happens in Practice Fusion and TalkEHR, neither EHR's own template engine can be the source of truth — a template stored in one is invisible in the other. The captured text becomes a plain folder of files that the pediatrician edits once and reaches from either system.
One search surface, two hosts. A palette that searches those files by name or by a phrase buried inside them, then puts the text into whatever note field currently has focus. Same keystroke, same shortcut, same result in both EHRs.
Nothing leaves the machine. Both are live EHRs. Blank templates aren't patient data, but anything running on a charting page can see patient data, so the build makes no network requests of any kind.