The best chart note is one that starts halfway done. Whether you’re seeing a patient for a recurring visit or a standard annual exam, Healthquest’s template tools can do a lot of the heavy lifting before you’ve typed a single character. This post covers three features that work together to help you chart faster without sacrificing quality: Templates with Defaults, ?? Quick Tabs, and Copy Old Templates.
Templates with Defaults: Your Starting Framework
A chart template default lets you pre-populate a note with text before the visit even begins. That might be a checklist of items to cover, standard instructions, or placeholder text with gaps for the provider to fill in. Instead of starting from a blank slate every time, you open the note and your framework is already there.
This is especially useful for predictable visit types — annual wellness exams, chronic disease management, pre-op screenings — where you want to make sure nothing gets missed.
How to set it up
- Go to Setup > Charting Setup > Template Design
- Select your template > Edit an Existing Template > Click Next, then Finish
- Important: Do not modify anything in the template itself at this stage
- Click Defaults at the top of the screen
- Click New, give the default a title, and type the text you want to pre-populate
- To insert dynamic data (like lab results or patient info), use the Form Field button to pull from other areas of Healthquest
💡 Pro Tip: You can pull in intake form responses directly into your template default, so any information the patient submitted before the visit automatically populates into the chart note — no re-entering required.
See Chart notes with defaults for more information.
?? Quick Tabs: Navigate Your Note Without the Mouse
When you’re building a template with defaults (or setting up a macro), you can insert ?? as a placeholder anywhere you want the clinician to fill in specific information. During the appointment, pressing Tab jumps from one ?? to the next — keeping your hands on the keyboard and your attention on the patient.
How it works:
- In a chart note: press Tab to jump from one ?? to the next
- In a letter: press Shift + F2 to navigate between placeholders
A well-designed template with defaults and ?? markers essentially create a guided charting experience — the note walks the provider through what needs to be documented, in order, without any hunting or scrolling.
💡 Pro Tip: The ?? trick works in both template defaults and autocomplete macros, so you can build checklists that are keyboard-navigable from start to finish.
Copy Old Templates: For Repeat Visits
Some patients come back for the same thing, time after time — wart treatments, allergy injections, blood pressure checks, suture removals. For these repeat visits, starting from the previous chart note often makes more sense than building a new one from scratch.
Healthquest makes this easy:
- Click New Chart Note
- In the bottom right corner of the note selection screen, choose the option to copy a prior note
- Select the note you want to copy
Copied content appears in red until you click into each field and review it — a built-in reminder to update anything that’s changed before you save.
💡 Pro Tip: Copy old templates offers recurring clinical procedure documentation but always treat the red text as a mandatory review. Patient condition, medications, and clinical details change — the visual flag keeps you from carrying forward outdated information.
Putting It All Together
These three features work best when you think of them as layers. Start with a template default for your visit framework, use ?? placeholders to guide documentation flow, and reserve copy-old-template for true repeat visits where most of the note will genuinely stay the same.
Combined with the macros and phrase lists from Part 1, you’re looking at a charting setup that can cut documentation time significantly — without making your notes any less thorough.
Need more detail? Check out our recent webinar Charting Efficiencies – Jan 2026
Up next in this series: The Reference Panel and Historical Field Values — the features that give you instant access to the patient’s full clinical picture while you chart.
Want help optimizing more workflows? Ask your account manager about a Practice Optimization visit for your clinic.