Anesthesia Typing Practice

Choosing Anesthesiology in the Specialty menu mixes an anesthesia vocabulary pack into the general medical stream. Anesthesia documentation is short, dense and repeated many times a day, and the pack covers each piece of it: the pre-op evaluation, the intraoperative record, block and neuraxial notes, PACU and the acute pain service.

Open the trainer with the Anesthesiology pack

Anesthesia record Blocks and neuraxial Pre-op clinic and PACU

Preset links open the trainer with those settings already applied; you can change them afterward.

What anesthesia documentation is made of

The pre-op evaluation compresses a whole history into a few lines: ASA class, with an E modifier for emergencies, functional capacity in METs, the airway exam (Mallampati class, thyromental distance, mouth opening, dentition), fasting status and which home medications were held. The intraoperative record is mostly structured fields, but its free text is dense: induction drugs in mg or mg/kg, laryngoscope blade and view, tube size and depth, ventilator settings, volatile agent and MAC, train-of-four, and a log of events with the drug given for each.

Block and neuraxial notes repeat one pattern with different numbers: target, approach, needle, volume and concentration of local anesthetic, test dose and level. PACU and pain service notes add Aldrete scores, PCA and epidural settings and discharge criteria. Numbers matter as much as words: mcg versus mg, mg/kg versus mcg/kg/min, and percent concentrations appear on nearly every line.

What the anesthesia pack adds

The pack has 1,079 new items and emphasizes about 490 general items already in the corpus, such as perioperative note lines, anesthetic drugs and airway procedures. Most of the roughly 580 new note lines are intraoperative record lines, where the typing volume sits, followed by pre-op, regional, obstetric and pain service lines:

• ASA 3 given morbid obesity and obstructive sleep apnea on continuous positive airway pressure
• Video laryngoscopy with a Mac 3 blade, grade 1 view, size 7 endotracheal tube placed
• Sevoflurane at 0.8 MAC with a dexmedetomidine infusion at 0.4 mcg/kg/hr
• Quantitative train-of-four count 0 with a post-tetanic count of 4
• Pericapsular nerve group block with 20 mL of 0.5 percent ropivacaine for hip arthroplasty
• Programmed intermittent epidural bolus 8 mL every 45 minutes, PCEA 5 mL with a 10 minute lockout
• Aldrete score 8, remains in phase 1 for an oxygen requirement

With Abbreviations on, the third line types as Sevo 0.8 MAC w/ dexmedetomidine 0.4 mcg/kg/hr. About 100 read lines cover TEE, gastric and lung ultrasound, laryngoscopic views, TEG and ROTEM, neuromonitoring and capnogram shapes. Dosing strings cover about 80 drugs with weight-based anesthesia doses and name the indication where the dose depends on it, for example sugammadex 2 mg/kg iv for TOF count of 2 or more.

How to practice between cases

For a case-record session, turn on Note Phrases, the generic drug chip, Physiology & Labs and Procedures, set the dosing slider to about 60, keep Abbreviations on and use Cascade so the text keeps moving the way a record does. The shorthand is heavy (GETA, RSI, TOF, EtCO2, EBL, PONV), so spend some sessions with Abbreviations off too. The toggle switches every pack line between its spelled-out and shorthand forms, and knowing both helps when you read another group's template.

For doses, turn on both drug chips with the slider at 100 and use Block, which stops the stream until each error is fixed. Units and decimals are where the per-key heatmap usually shows red. Three to five minutes is enough to keep the number row and symbol keys sharp, which fits between cases. The chips filter the general corpus as well, and Term frequency and AI Mode apply as usual.