Use of templates for clinical documentation in psychiatric evaluations-beneficial or counterproductive for residents in training?

In psychiatry, as in other disciplines, electronic templates are replacing handwritten records to meet health care financing regulations and requirements of third-party payers. We address whether these checklists are helpful for residents, especially those beginning training, in learning the foundational skills of their discipline and in recording a comprehensive set of patient data. An informal survey of our residents suggests that residents find the templates useful, though they have advantages and disadvantages. We also review relevant literature from psychiatry and other fields on the use of electronic templates and pose questions about how we might gauge the usefulness of the templates in residents' training and in obtaining valid data for clinical decision-making.