How Auto Fill Works

Auto Fill is SOAP Note Buddy’s core feature. It scans your EMR page, detects every fillable field, generates clinically appropriate content, and fills the form for you.

Plan requirement: EHR Fill or Voice Scribe. EHR Auto Fill is included in the EHR Fill plan and the Voice Scribe plan. The AI Notes plan does not include it. A free trial includes whatever your selected plan includes, so an EHR Fill or Voice Scribe trial has Auto Fill and an AI Notes trial does not. See the plans article.

How It Works

1. Open your patient’s note in your EMR.
2. Open the SOAP Note Buddy extension. On the Visit screen, pick the patient with the switcher at the top and type or record the visit in the Visit Summary box.
3. Click Fill EHR. It fills from the visit summary, so you don’t need to write a note first.
4. The extension scans the page, expanding any collapsed sections or accordion panels to find hidden fields.
5. AI generates content for each detected field based on your visit summary, the patient’s eval summary, prior note history, and any custom instructions you have set.
6. Fields are filled automatically.

In the app, tap Fill EHR on the Visit screen. Your EMR opens inside the app with the patient and visit summary ready. Go to the note page, tap the floating patient button, then tap Fill Page.

Auto Fill works with any web-based EMR, including Kinnser, Tebra, WebPT, PointClickCare, Epic, and others. No configuration or field mapping is required. The AI reads labels, section headers, and page structure to understand what each field needs.

Fill From a Note You Already Wrote (extension)

If you wrote an AI Note first and like its wording, click Fill EHR at the bottom of the note instead of on the Visit screen. The fill uses that note (with your edits) as its source and keeps its sentences, placing each part in the matching EHR field. Details the note does not cover come from your visit summary.

Repeat Visits Stay Fresh

Every note is written fresh for that visit. The AI treats your visit summary as the authoritative record of what happened, and it uses the patient’s previous note only as a reference for progress and comparative values (for example, moving from “moderate assistance” to “minimal assistance”), never as text to copy. The more detail you put in the visit summary, the more specific and unique each note will be. If you leave the visit summary blank or very brief, the AI has to lean more on the eval summary and prior note, which can make notes for the same patient feel similar between visits.

Multi-page notes. After a fill, Continue Note keeps the note open so the next page you fill stays consistent with the first, and Finish Note closes it. If you forget to finish, the note closes on its own 12 hours after its last fill, so the next visit is always written fresh, never as another page of an old note.

Get notified when your note is ready (Chrome extension)

AI generation can take several seconds, so you don’t have to sit and watch. If you switch to another tab while the extension is working, it shows a browser notification the moment your content is generated and ready to fill. Click the notification to jump back to your EHR tab and finish filling. This is on by default; you can turn it off under Settings, in the Auto Fill Behavior section (“Notify me when the note is ready to fill”).

Saving Your EHRs (iOS app)

In the iOS app’s EHR tab, you can save your frequently used EHR sites so you don’t have to retype the web address each visit. Open an EHR like Axxess or Kinnser, then tap the bookmark icon at the right end of the URL bar and choose Save current site (the name is prefilled from the site’s domain, and you can edit it). Your saved EHRs appear in that same bookmark menu, each showing the site’s icon. Tap one to jump straight to it, or tap the × beside a site to remove it. Tapping the URL bar also highlights the whole address so you can quickly overwrite it. Your saved EHR list syncs to your account, so it follows you to a new device or if you delete and reinstall the app.

Chat with Buddy (adjust your results)

After Auto Fill finishes, the completion screen shows how many fields were filled along with a Chat with Buddy button. This is the easiest way to change anything you did not like. Instead of hunting through a list of fields, you just tell Buddy what you want in plain language, like talking to a helpful colleague.

For example, you can say:

• “Make the assessment shorter and less generic.”
• “She is using a single-point cane now. Update the gait fields.”
• “You left Prior Level of Function blank. Please fill it.”
• “Rewrite the whole note, it does not sound like me.”

Buddy figures out which fields you mean, updates them, fills them onto your EHR page right away, and tells you exactly what it changed. It sticks to the fields you asked about, so it will not quietly change something clinically important like homebound status, rehab potential, or weight-bearing status unless you name it. If your request is genuinely unclear about which fields you mean, Buddy asks one quick question.

If Buddy says it made a change and you do not see it on the page, just tell it (“that field is still empty”). It will re-apply the change rather than debate it.

Values Buddy estimates for you

If you ask Buddy to fill something it does not have a real number for, it fills it in rather than refusing. It looks for a real value first, in your visit summary, your evaluation, or the previous note, and uses that when it exists. When it has to estimate, it bases the numbers on that patient’s age, diagnosis, and presentation instead of generic textbook values, and it tells you in the chat which values to double check before you sign.

Two things Buddy will not do: invent a signature or credentials, and guess a date. Both are yours to enter.

Saving a preference as a rule

When you tell Buddy something that would apply to every future note (a default value, a formatting preference, a section to always leave blank), it can save that as one of your EHR Fill Rules so it happens automatically next time.

Buddy pays attention to repetition. If you keep asking for the same thing, it will offer to make it automatic rather than waiting for you to ask again. For a clear preference it saves the rule right away and tells you exactly what it saved, so you can change or remove it in one message. When your intent could be read more than one way, it shows you the wording first and waits for your yes.

It only saves preferences that would still be correct for a different patient, so one patient’s clinical wording never becomes a rule. You can view, edit, and delete every rule in Settings.

Nothing is submitted to your EHR while you chat. When everything looks right, click Next Page or Finished on the completion screen.

You can ask Buddy questions too, not just give it instructions. Questions about the fill itself (“why did you check that box?”, “where did that number come from?”) are answered from the note in front of it. Product questions such as pricing, billing, or where to find a feature are looked up in the help docs and answered right there in the chat.

You can also select and copy any text from the chat. If a field will not fill for some reason, ask Buddy to write the text in the chat and paste it into your EHR yourself.

Field Preview

Buddy is the recommended way to adjust a fill, but the same edits are also available as a manual field list if you prefer working that way. In the list you can:

• Review each field’s generated content.
• Edit any field directly. Edits are saved automatically, so a correction you make here is kept with the note and used as context for the patient’s future notes.
• Rewrite a single field if you want a different result, or Rewrite All Fields to regenerate everything at once. Regenerated content fills onto the page automatically, so you don’t have to press Fill again afterward.
• Skip a field. Skipped fields show a “(skipped)” placeholder and won’t be filled.
• Locate a field on the page by clicking its entry in the list.

Field Preferences

SOAP Note Buddy remembers your preferences for each EMR. If you skip or remove a field during preview, it will be skipped automatically on future visits to that same EMR. This means Auto Fill gets smarter and faster the more you use it.

Tips for Best Results

• Add a detailed eval summary for each patient. The more context the AI has, the better the output.
• Enter a visit summary before each fill. It is the primary source for the note, and a detailed summary is what makes each visit’s note accurate and unique.
• Use custom instructions to guide the AI toward your preferred writing style or terminology.
• Review the Field Preview after each fill to catch anything that needs adjustment.