Every practitioner decides for themselves whether they prefer to keep paper or electronic records. Paper records provide a more familiar format, are easier to customize to your needs, and have lower upfront costs. Meanwhile, electronic health records (EHRs) help standardize, streamline, and organize information, thereby improving efficiency and decreasing the need for storage space. EHRs have the following advantages over paper records:
☑️ Localization. It’s easier to keep all your EHRs in one location, whether it’s a file folder on your computer or a client profile within a specialized recordkeeping service. Paper records are misplaced or lost more easily.
☑️ Organization. EHRs are more legible and easier to organize and search. You can locate the necessary information within your EHRs by using a search function or sorting by keywords.
☑️ Redundancy minimization. With EHRs, there is no need to copy the same information by hand into different forms or documents, and you can make changes to your records more easily.
☑️ Portability. EMRs are at your fingertips wherever you have your electronic device and an Internet connection. They don’t take up any additional space, and you easily can carry them wherever you go.
☑️ Ease of third-party sharing. Computerized documentation grants practitioners from different disciplines access to clients’ information to ensure care continuity. EHRs will also be necessary for potential insurance reimbursement in the future.
☑️ Security. A locked filing cabinet provides less security than a properly encrypted and secured Internet server.
☑️ Protection from a natural disaster or criminal sabotage. Paper records are vulnerable in the event of a tornado, hurricane, fire, or flood. They are also at risk if there is a break-in. EHRs allow you to maintain continuity of business following a natural disaster or criminal activity. If you store your records with a specialized recordkeeping service, your EHRs will be safe even if your computer is damaged or stolen.
The Sequence Wiz Electronic Health Records System for Yoga Teachers and Yoga Therapists helps you organize information about your students and classes to make the recordkeeping process more enjoyable, allowing your yoga teaching practice to operate more smoothly.
The Student Profile includes all information about your student that you collect and create. The Profile usually includes:
A Yoga Liability Waiver is a document that minimizes the risk of liability for yoga teachers and yoga therapists in the event that a participant experiences emotional or physical injury during your yoga class or private session. It is a good practice to ask your new students to sign a waiver before their first class or session so that everybody is clear that the student assumes full responsibility for their yoga experience.
It is also recommended that you provide all students with a HIPAA notice of privacy practices and follow the responsibilities outlined in that document.
Many yoga teachers send their new students an Intake form to fill out prior to the first class or session. This form can contain different kinds of questions, including essential information we need to know for safety purposes, such as diagnosed conditions, recent surgeries, current medications and treatments, etc. It can also contain other kinds of questions that give the teacher a better understanding of the challenges that the student is dealing with within the context of their lives. It’s useful to organize the Intake form according to the Panchamaya Model structure and ask questions that relate to different layers of the student’s system.
It is important to understand the particulars of the student’s physical structure, both in stillness and in motion.
Session notes usually include a description of what had occurred during the session. The session notes are usually written in SOAP format and include information on the student’s subjective reporting about their state (S), the teacher’s objective reporting on every activity the student completed during the session (O), the teacher’s assessment of the student’s response to various yogic practices (A), and recommended intervention strategies and plans for the future (P). It can also be useful to make notes in terms of the goals that have been set for the client.
Helping students articulate their desires and goals is essential for yoga teachers and therapists because it defines the direction of their work and choice of strategies, and it’s essential for students because it helps narrow their focus and set their expectations.
In clinical environments, health practitioners usually formulate goals in functional, measurable, observable, and action-oriented terms. Goals should also be realistic for the student, appropriate for their lifestyle and activity level, and achievable in a reasonable amount of time.
For your students to get real, lasting results from their yoga practice, they need to integrate yoga into their daily routine. Giving your students home practice handouts that are easy to understand and follow helps them take ownership of their practice. Sequence Wiz yoga sequence builder makes it easy to create classes and private yoga sessions using customizable stick figure images. You can drag and drop images of poses, breathing practices, and mudras and add your instructions to make unique yoga practices for your students.
The yoga tradition has its own models for assessing the student’s system-wide state of health and well-being and for choosing specific strategies to facilitate healing.
When you begin to work with a new student, it might be difficult to tell which information is relevant to their challenges and is worth exploring and recording. To make it easier, we usually start with collecting information about the most obvious aspects of their life and experience. This includes personal information about age and occupation, health history, and the types of challenges they are currently experiencing. We also need to find out what brought them to yoga and what they would like to get out of their yoga experience in practical, tangible terms.
Then we move on to observing their body, complexion, demeanor, and attitudes, both in stillness and in motion. All this information helps us get a better sense of who that person is on different layers of their system. It usually helps to have a template for a more systematic approach and record the basic information we need to proceed safely and effectively.
