Help Centre › Clinical care

Clinical history

Everything ever recorded about a patient on one screen — visits, notes, lab results, medication, vitals, weight trends and attached files — searchable, filterable, and available without leaving the consultation you are in.

Every visit a patient has ever had, every note written about it, every result that came back, everything dispensed and every file attached, on one page in date order. It is the screen a vet opens before touching the animal, and the one that answers “what did we do last time?” in seconds rather than in a pile of cards.

Opening it#

There are three ways in, and they all land on the same screen:

From	How
Mid-consultation	Press History in the footer. The consultation stays open behind it — nothing you have typed or charged is lost.
The patient record	Open the client, open the patient, press History.
A lab result	From the result, to see it in the context of the rest of the animal's history.

Tip

Mid-visit is the one worth building a habit around. Checking what was prescribed last time, or whether a vaccination is genuinely due, takes a few seconds from inside the consultation and saves the phone call afterwards.

What is on the screen#

The clinical history: AI summary, weight trend, returned lab results, and the timeline beneath them.

The page is built in four bands, in the order a vet wants them:

Band	What it holds
AI Summary	A short written recap of the whole record, where your practice has AI features on. Arrives collapsed. See Voice notes & AI summaries.
Trends	A small chart per measurement that has more than one reading — weight first, then any vital that has been taken more than once.
Lab results	Every returned result, newest first, with its out-of-range count. See Lab results.
The timeline	One card per visit, in date order, with filters and a search box above it.

Note

Bands with nothing in them do not appear. A patient with one recorded weight has no trend chart, and a patient with no lab work has no results band — the page is as long as the animal's history and no longer.

The summary at the top#

The AI summary opened out: the whole record in four lines.

Where your practice has AI features switched on, FastVet keeps a written summary of the patient's whole record and shows it above everything else. It arrives collapsed — tap the bar to open it.

It is worth the five seconds before a consultation for a patient you do not know. What it is not is a substitute for the record: it is written from the notes, so anything nobody wrote down is not in it.

Who can do this

Everyone who can open the history can read the summary. How it is generated, how current it is, and what to do when it is wrong are covered in Voice notes & AI summaries.

Weight and vital trends#

Each chart plots one measurement over time, with the latest reading called out and the change since the first point on the chart. Weight is always first where there is one.

A chart appears only once there are two or more readings — one point is not a trend.
The shaded band is your practice's normal range for that reading, set under Settings → Vitals. A line leaving the band is the thing to look at.
Show values under a chart lists the readings and their dates, for when you need the number rather than the shape.

Tip

This is the payoff for recording a weight at every visit, even a rough one. A cat quietly losing 400 g over three visits is obvious on the chart and invisible in the notes.

Lab results in context#

A returned panel opened out. Only the out-of-range analytes are shown until you ask for the rest.

Every result is listed newest first, with the date, the lab, and one of four things. Tap one to open it.

Says	Means
⚠ 2 out of range	The panel is back and two values fall outside the reference range. Those two are what the panel opens on.
✓ All within range	The panel is back in full and nothing is flagged.
⏳ Awaiting results	The lab has the order but has sent nothing back yet. There is nothing here to be reassured by.
⏳ 3 of 45 back, none out of range	Part of the panel has returned and is clean so far. The rest is still out.

Two panels on the same patient: one back with two values flagged, one the lab has acknowledged but not yet resulted.

Careful

Read the amber ones as “not yet”, not as “fine”. A reference lab often acknowledges an order and returns the analyte list before it returns any values, so a panel can look complete — 45 analytes, nothing flagged — while every value on it is still pending. The green all-clear appears only when the whole panel is genuinely back.

An opened panel shows the flagged analytes only — the value, the reference range, and Low or High. That is deliberate: a chemistry panel is fifty-odd lines and two of them matter. Show all values at the top, or show all values at the foot of a panel, opens the rest.

Note

A result appears here as soon as the lab acknowledges the order, whether or not anybody has reviewed it on the lab results screen — which is why the amber states exist.

The timeline#

Two visits, opened out: the notes as written, then the items in their own groups.

Below the filters, one card per event, newest first. The header carries the date, what it was — Consult 103792, Pet Data Upload, Vitals — who recorded it, and a count of what is inside: 2 notes · 2 items.

Everything opens by default. Reading a history should not mean clicking through twenty cards, so they all start expanded and the filters are the tool for cutting the volume down. A card in your way can still be folded shut on its own.

Inside a card the contents are grouped rather than listed flat, because a visit reads as “what was found, what was given, what was written”:

Group	What lands in it
Doctor notes / Client notes	The two notes boxes from the visit, each under its own label. A box left empty does not appear. See Clinical notes.
Vitals	The readings taken at that visit, and the weight.
Results & tests	Lab and imaging lines, with the result where one has been typed against the line.
Medication	What was dispensed, with the dispensing instruction underneath it.
Items	Everything else charged on the visit — the consultation fee, procedures, consumables.
Files	Anything attached, as a row of chips. Tap one to open it.

Cutting a long history down#

Filtered to Vitals: only the readings, in date order.

Above the timeline sit five chips and a search box. Everything is the default; the other four narrow it, and they combine rather than replace — turning on Vitals and Notes shows both.

Chip	Keeps
Labs & results	Lab and imaging lines, and anything with a result typed against it.
Medication	Dispensed drugs, injectables, vaccinations, fluids and sedation.
Vitals	Recorded vitals and weights.
Notes	The written record — Doctor Notes and Client Notes.

The search box narrows by text at the same time, across the description, the result, any comment and the file name. “amox” finds every visit that dispensed it.

Note

The chips sort by what each record is — a lab line, a dispensed medicine, a set of readings — not by how your practice happens to name its catalogue categories. Whatever you call them, the chips find them.

Documents, photographs and scans#

Uploaded files on the timeline, each with the note that was saved with it.

Anything uploaded against the patient — a signed consent, an insurance form, a radiograph, a letter from a specialist — appears on the timeline on the day it was added, with whatever was typed as its description. Tap a file chip to open it.

Files are uploaded from the patient record rather than from here. See Documents and photographs.

Tip

Describe the file as you upload it. “Right stifle radiograph — lateral view” is findable a year later; “IMG_0413.jpg” is not, and the description is what the search box reads.

Turning the history into a referral#

Compose Referral in the footer builds a referral letter out of the records on this screen, so the specialist gets the actual history rather than a summary written from memory. It is the reason the referral flow starts here and not on the consultation.

The full walkthrough is in Consultations → Referral letters.

Note

Compose Referral is greyed out on a patient with no history — there would be nothing to put in the letter.

Who can see it#

Who can do this

The clinical history is open to all clinical and reception staff. It is read-only everywhere — nothing on this screen can be edited from it. To correct something, open the visit it belongs to.

None of it reaches the client. The one field a client sees from a visit is Client Notes, and they see it in the portal rather than here — see The client portal.