Charting an Acupuncture Treatment

The acupuncture panel sits in the encounter sidebar. It is a launcher and a summary; the charting happens in the window it opens.

Start a treatment

• Click + New treatment to start from nothing.
• Choose from Apply a protocol… to start from a saved prescription.
• Under Previously, click a past treatment to copy its points onto today’s encounter.

Cloning copies the prescription — the points, sides, depths and techniques. It deliberately does not copy what happened: times, needle counts, de qi, pain scores and contact time all start clean, because they are a record of a different session.

Add points

• Type in Find a point to search by code, pinyin, English name or Chinese characters. LI4, LI-4, Hegu and 合谷 all find the same point.
• Narrow the list with Channel.
• Click Add an ashi point for a tender point with no code, and name the muscle.

A point carrying a caution shows a marker in the search results. Hover it to read the caution. Nothing is ever blocked — the cautions are there to inform your judgement, not to overrule it.

Tick show every field for direction, gauge, length, e-stim pairing and the rest.

Record the time — the part that matters for billing

There are two different durations and they are not interchangeable.

Use Start timer when you are with the patient and Stop timer when you leave them, or type minutes into Or add and choose what you were doing. The timer uses the server clock, not the clock on the computer you are working at.

Time the patient rests alone with needles in is documented care, but it is not personal one-on-one contact and it is not billable as such. Billing retention time as contact time is the single most common finding in an acupuncture audit, which is why this software keeps the two figures apart and offers no way to copy one into the other.

Count the needles out

The Needle count chip at the top of the window tracks whether everything that went in has come out.

• In the Removed column, blank and 0 mean different things. Blank means nobody has counted yet; 0 means you counted and none came out.
• Tick Retained for a press tack or intradermal needle left in on purpose. Those are subtracted from what has to come out, so deliberate retention never makes a correctly finished session look unreconciled.

Post the charges and write the note

Nothing you do in the charting window reaches the patient’s ledger. Saving is safe and automatic. When the session is finished, post the treatment to put the charges on the encounter, and click to note in the sidebar to add the write-up to the chart.

A treatment can only be added to the note once. If you genuinely want it twice, the software asks first.