# Charting

Charting is where clinicians produce the durable record of care – the patient summary read at every visit, the encounter notes captured during one, and the orders and follow-up that come out of it. Medplum is headless: your app owns the screens, while the underlying FHIR data model keeps the record interoperable, queryable, and reusable.

## Where to Start

1. [Designing Charting](/content/docs/charting/designing-charting/index.html) – discovery questions (visit types, parsing, signing, template ownership).
2. [Visit Templates and the SOAP Approach](/content/docs/charting/visit-templates/index.html) – [`PlanDefinition`](/content/docs/api/fhir/resources/plandefinition/index.html), SOAP mapped to structured S/O/P plus narrative assessment, [`$apply`](/content/docs/api/fhir/operations/plandefinition-apply/index.html), signing.
3. [Chart Data Model](/content/docs/charting/chart-data-model/index.html) – Patient, Observation, Condition, allergies, devices, vitals, and queries for the chart UI.

Supporting guides:

- [Parsing Questionnaire Responses](/content/docs/questionnaires/parsing-questionnaire-responses/index.html) – `$extract` versus Bots for questionnaire responses.
- [Provider Visits](/content/docs/provider/visits/index.html) – Care Templates and Provider app setup (UI-specific).
- [Authoring Clinical Protocols](/content/docs/careplans/protocols/index.html) – advanced PlanDefinition composition.

## Sample Application

Charting can look however you want. A reference UI built from Medplum [React components](https://storybook.medplum.com/?path=/docs/medplum-introduction--docs) lives in [medplum-provider](https://github.com/medplum/medplum/tree/main/examples/medplum-provider).

## Orders and Billing

Orders are usually [`ServiceRequest`](/content/docs/api/fhir/resources/servicerequest/index.html) and [`MedicationRequest`](/content/docs/api/fhir/resources/medicationrequest/index.html) resources, optionally spawned from ActivityDefinitions in visit templates. See [Labs and Imaging](/content/docs/labs-imaging/index.html), [Medications](/content/docs/medications/representing-prescriptions-and-medication-orders/index.html), and [Provider visits](/content/docs/provider/visits/index.html) for billing-oriented ChargeItem flows.