Dermatology Typing Practice

The Dermatology pack loads skin exam, procedure and treatment vocabulary into ClinicalTypingLab, a free trainer that streams clinical note text for you to type. It adds 898 items and gives extra weight to 255 general items that dermatology notes use often. This page covers what is in the pack and how to practice with it.

Open the trainer with the Dermatology pack

Skin exam and lesion description Topicals, systemics and biologics Biopsy, Mohs and dermpath, spelled out

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

What dermatology notes are made of

Dermatology notes are built from description. A skin exam is a list of lesions, each written in the same order: primary lesion, color, size in millimeters or centimeters, border and configuration, surface change such as scale or crust, then location with laterality, often down to the nasal ala or the helical rim. Inflammatory disease adds percent body surface area and scores such as PASI, EASI and DLQI.

Plans are just as specific. A topical order names the drug, strength, vehicle, frequency, site and duration, and a systemic or biologic plan lists screening labs and loading and maintenance intervals. Procedure notes fill every clinic day: consent, anesthetic, shave or punch biopsy, excision margins, suture size and closure length, cryotherapy and Mohs stages. Results come back in dermatopathology language, such as Breslow thickness, mitotic rate and margin status.

What the dermatology pack adds

About half the pack is note phrases, 482 of them, weighted toward exam morphology, assessment and plan. They cover skin cancers and their mimics, pigmented lesions, acne and rosacea, eczema and contact dermatitis, psoriasis, hair loss, infections and urticaria, plus the inpatient problems dermatology is consulted for, such as SJS/TEN, DRESS and pyoderma gangrenosum. The 98 report lines hold dermatopathology reads, dermoscopy descriptions and bedside test results. Lines from the pack:

• Pearly pink papule with arborizing telangiectasias on the left nasal ala, 5 mm
• Well-demarcated erythematous plaques w/ thick silvery scale on the elbows, knees, and gluteal cleft
• Psoriasis involving approx 12% BSA
• Punch biopsy 4 mm from the active border, closed with two 4-0 nylon simple interrupted sutures
• Mohs stage 1: 1 section, tumor present at the deep margin at 3 o'clock
• Dermoscopy: atypical pigment network with irregular streaks at the periphery
• Patch test: p-phenylenediamine 2+, relevant to hair dye exposure

Dosing strings for 125 drugs keep the strength and vehicle, because that is how dermatology orders are written: triamcinolone 0.1% ointment topically bid or tretinoin 0.05% cream topically qhs. Biologic entries carry loading and maintenance doses, such as dupilumab 600 mg subcutaneously x1 loading dose.

How to practice with the dermatology pack

Choose Dermatology from the Specialty menu above the category chips. About half of what you type then comes from the pack and the rest from the general corpus, and the chips filter both. For exam lines, turn on Note Phrases, Symptoms & Signs, Anatomy and Radiology & Path Findings; with dermatology selected, that last chip carries dermoscopy and dermatopathology lines alongside general reads. Morphology lines are long and mostly made of ordinary words, so Cascade mode, which lets errors pass, is a fair test of speed.

For orders, turn on both drug chips and set the dosing slider to 60 percent or more. Percentages, decimals and suture sizes such as 4-0 and 5-0 are where errors cluster, so Block mode, which stops the stream at each error until you fix it, pays off there. The Abbreviations toggle switches every pack phrase between its spelled-out form and derm shorthand such as BCC, SCCIS, TBSE, ED&C and ILK.

Ten to fifteen minutes on one setup is enough to see patterns in the per-key heatmap. AI Mode works on top of the pack. You do not need an account, and your progress stays in your browser. For full surgical pathology reports, see pathology report typing.