SOAP notes, written closer to the moment.
A nurse charting from memory at 6pm loses most of what happened at 11am. Companion captures observations as they occur and drafts the note with provenance.
At 6pm a nurse sits down to chart a resident she saw at 11am, 1pm, and 3:30pm. In between were two falls on the unit, a family call, and a med pass. The note she writes is honest and careful, but it is reconstructed. The refusal at 11am has blurred into the refusal at 3:30. The phrasing the resident used — the part that mattered — is gone. This is not a nurse problem. It is a timing problem.
Companion sits at the bedside through the shift. When the resident says something, it captures the words. When an intervention is offered and refused, it records the offer, the refusal, and the time. When behavioral state shifts — agitation rising at sundown, a flat affect after a phone call — that observation is logged with a timestamp. By end of shift, there is a stream of small, dated facts.
What SOAP is, briefly
A SOAP note has four parts. Subjective is what the resident reported — their pain, their mood, their complaints in their own words. Objective is what was measured or observed — vitals, intake, gait, skin. Assessment is the clinician's read of what is going on. Plan is what happens next. It is a structure that forces a nurse to separate what was said from what was seen from what they concluded.
Provenance for each line
Companion drafts the SOAP from the day's observations, and every line in the draft points back to the observation that produced it. Resident reported left hip pain 6/10 at ambulation links to the 11:14am audio clip where she said it. Refused PM shower, offered again at 7pm, accepted links to two timestamped events. The nurse opens the draft and sees not just the sentence, but the source. Edit, sign, post.
The product impact is small and concrete. The chart is more accurate because it was written closer to the moment it happened. The nurse's review time is spent on judgment — does this assessment match what I saw, is the plan right — instead of on transcription. Next up: a one-tap way to pull a source clip into a family conversation, so the nurse can show, not just tell.