Why SOAP Is Bad for the Medical Record
- 1 March 1992
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Medical Association (AMA) in Archives of internal medicine (1960)
- Vol. 152 (3) , 481-484
- https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.1992.00400150015004
Abstract
Twenty-some years ago, Weed,1,2 Bjorn and Cross,3 and Hurst and Walker4 sought to revolutionize patient care, medical education, and clinical investigation with a new system of medical record keeping, the problem-oriented medical record (POMR). The revolution was more successful than most. Some of Weed's major reforms, those concerned with "problems" and "problem lists," endure throughout the United States. Unfortunately, the POMR also brought us SOAP. SOAP, of course, is the acronym derived from the POMR's recipe for an initial note or a progress note about a problem: (1) subjective, (2) objective, (3) assessment, and (4) plans. Embedded in SOAP, therefore, is the important idea that clinical "data" (to use POMR lingo) are either subjective or objective. THE CATEGORIES SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE Weed said that he introduced the categories subjective and objective in order to distinguish one important source of clinical information (the patient) from other sources (theKeywords
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