Tagging Best Practices

The flexibility of adding unlimited tags is great, but there are a few things to be mindful of. It’s easy to create too many variations of the same tag that may all relate to the same topic, or tags that are too specific and won’t relate to any other subscribers (avoid using tags for things like email addresses and phone numbers).

Establishing Your Tag System

To start, you may want to sit down with a pencil and paper and think through the general categories you want to group your subscribers in. Use the tag ideas page and think high-level, meaning the tag should apply to more than 1 subscriber.

Remember – you’re creating lists of people with something in common.

How many tags is too many? Or not enough? There is no right answer. It depends on what suits the needs of your particular practice and what subscribers make sense for you to group together.

Consistency

It’s best to be consistent in your naming conventions. If you want a “wellness” group, watch out for making tag variations of the same group like “wellness care,” “well care,” “wellcare,” “wc.”

Or let’s say you’ve grouped some patients by condition, and “shoulder pain” is one of your tags. Creating variations of the shoulder pain tag, like “shoulder blade pain,” “shoulder condition,” “pain in shoulder” may end up diluting your plan of grouping all patients with “shoulder pain”.

Bottom line – before you create a new tag, check to see if you already have an existing tag for that particular group.

Using Multiple Tags On a Subscriber

As a general rule of thumb, try to keep your tags to a single topic. For example, if you’re grouping patients by condition and you want to tag a patient with back pain and sciatica, instead of one tag named “back pain and sciatica”, it would make more sense to add two tags to the subscriber: “back pain”, “sciatica”.