Parallel Charts

The SOAP note is the standard documentation format in Electronic Health Records. Subjective: what the patient reports — symptoms, history, concerns in their own words. Objective: measurable clinical findings — vital signs, lab results, physical exam. Assessment: the clinician’s interpretation — diagnosis, differential, clinical reasoning. Plan: the course of action — medications, referrals, follow-up, patient education.

An Electronic Health Record is the digital version of a patient’s medical chart. It contains clinical notes, lab results, medications, imaging, and administrative data. The EHR structures medical knowledge into standardized, searchable fields — a powerful tool for clinical care, but one that necessarily compresses the complexity of a human encounter into categorical data.

Narrative medicine is a clinical practice developed by Rita Charon at Columbia University that uses close reading and reflective writing to strengthen the clinician’s capacity for attention, representation, and affiliation with patients. The parallel chart — a private, reflective text written alongside the official medical record — is its signature exercise. Where the medical chart asks “what happened clinically?”, the parallel chart asks “what happened humanly?”

Physicians have written poetry for centuries. William Carlos Williams brought imagist precision to clinical observation. Rafael Campo writes formal sonnets about HIV care and identity. Jack Coulehan explores the examined life of primary care. Miroslav Holub, a Czech immunologist, treated science and poetry as parallel ways of knowing. These poems are written in that tradition — attending closely to the sensory detail of the clinical moment, finding in it something that resists the chart note’s certainty.

No. These are entirely fictional clinical scenarios generated by AI as educational and reflective exercises. No real patient information is used. The scenarios are designed to be medically plausible and emotionally authentic while remaining clearly theoretical.

Yes. These parallel charts are designed for use in medical humanities education, narrative medicine workshops, philosophy of medicine seminars, and creative writing programs. They can serve as discussion prompts, writing models, or starting points for students to create their own parallel charts.