Editing a Standard
Practices change. A new piece of software arrives, a step gets added, a role is renamed. Keeping standards current is what makes your team trust them. This page covers changing a standard yourself: its properties and its steps, using SOPHIE's editor.
To have SOPHIE make the changes for you instead, use Improve with SOPHIE on the standard. See Create with SOPHIE.
Open the Edit SOP panel
- Open the standard.
- Click Edit in its header. You'll only see Edit if your role can edit standards.
The Edit SOP panel slides in from the right with every part of the standard in one place. When you're done, click Save. Click Cancel to close without saving. SOPHIE confirms with SOP updated.
Save stays greyed out until the standard has a Title, at least one Owner and at least one assignee role.
What you can change
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Title | What the standard is called. Start it with an action verb, for example "VERIFY insurance for new patients". |
| Owner | The roles responsible for keeping it accurate. Pick one or more roles. Owners are always roles, so the job stays covered when people change. |
| Department | The departments it belongs to. |
| Spaces | The locations it applies to. Leave it as All spaces if it applies everywhere. |
| Flow | Patient, Admin or Office. This decides where it's grouped in the library. |
| Tags | Shared labels. See Tags and bulk edit. |
| Compliance | The Risk level (Low, Medium, High, Critical) and any Regulatory source it answers to: OSHA, HIPAA, CDC Guidelines, ADA Standards, State Dental Board, FDA, EPA. |
| Assignees & schedule | Which roles do it, and when. "Assignees are roles. Group roles that share a cadence — each group has its own schedule." Click Add schedule group to give another set of roles a different schedule. See Roles and schedules. |
| Procedure | The steps themselves, written in the editor described below. |
Write in the editor
The procedure is written in SOPHIE's rich editor, the same one used for FIX List items and to-dos. It works like a word processor. You don't need any special formatting codes.
The toolbar
From left to right:
- Font Family and Font Size.
- Bold (Ctrl+B), Italic (Ctrl+I), Underline (Ctrl+U).
- Text Color and Highlight Color.
- Heading 1, Heading 2, Bullet List, Numbered List.
- Insert Table. When your cursor is inside a table, the buttons change to add or delete rows and columns, or delete the table. Drag a column border to resize it.
- Add Link: turns selected text into a web link.
- Upload Media: adds a photo or video from your computer.
- Dictate text: speak and SOPHIE types and tidies it up. The first time, she shows a privacy notice. Don't dictate patient information.
- Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Redo (Ctrl+Shift+Z).
- Link SOP: links to another standard.
- Insert Loom Video: embeds a video from your Loom library.
You can also use quick shortcuts as you type: start a line with # for a heading, - for a
bullet, or 1. for a numbered list.
The slash menu
Type / on a new line to open a menu of things to add. Move with the arrow keys, press Enter to choose, or Esc to close.
- From this computer
- Upload files: photos, video, audio, PDF, Word or Excel.
- Connected sources
- Google and Microsoft 365: pick a file from your Google Drive or OneDrive. Rows you haven't connected show Connect. If your access has expired, they show Reconnect.
- Loom: pick a video from your Loom library, or paste a Loom link to add one.
- Elsewhere
- Video link: embed a YouTube, Vimeo or direct video address (Embed a video).
- Another procedure: link a standard from your workspace.
- Manage connectors: connect or disconnect your accounts.
Link to another standard
Linking standards lets your team jump from one procedure to the next, for example from "OPEN the office" to "START the sterilization cycle". There are three ways:
- Type # and start typing a title. Pick from Link an SOP.
- Click Link SOP in the toolbar and search (Search SOPs by title...).
- Choose Another procedure from the slash menu.
Add photos, videos and files
- Drag and drop or paste a file straight into the editor. Photos and videos appear inline. Other files become a file card people can open.
- Paste a link to a YouTube, Vimeo or Loom video and it's embedded as a player. Other links become a link card.
- Paste from Google Docs or Word: formatting is cleaned up, and images in what you paste are uploaded too.
Files from Google Drive or OneDrive
When you add a file from a connected drive, SOPHIE keeps her own copy so everyone on your team can open it, even people who don't have access to your drive. The confirmation tells you this, for example "Everyone can open it. It will not follow later edits." That means if the original changes, re-add it to update the standard.
If your practice allows linking for work accounts, a file may be linked instead. A linked file stays current with the original, but it only opens for people who can already open the original.
Videos picked from Google Drive are embedded as players and set to "anyone with the link" so your team can watch them.
What happens when you save
- A new version is recorded. Every change to the steps is kept in the standard's history, and you can compare or restore earlier versions. See Versions and history.
- Editing a published standard: if you change its steps and you're a practice owner, a practice manager or one of the standard's owners, the change goes live straight away. Otherwise it goes to the standard's owner to review. See Review and publish.
- People may be asked to acknowledge. When a published standard changes, the people assigned to it may be asked to confirm they've read the new version. See Acknowledgements.
- Assignment and schedule changes reach My Day. Adding or removing roles, or changing a schedule, changes whose list the standard lands on.
When SOPHIE drafted the edit
When a FIX List item leads to a change in a standard, SOPHIE can draft the edit for you. You review it in the same panel, titled Review SOPHIE's edit. A note above the procedure shows what was asked for and what she changed. Read it, change anything you like, then click Save.
If the standard changed after SOPHIE drafted her edit, the panel tells you so, and you'll need to draft it again from the FIX List so nobody's change is undone.
Delete a standard
Roles that can manage standards see a trash icon (Delete SOP) in the Edit SOP panel's header. Deleting moves the standard to Trash, where it can be restored for 30 days.
Good to know
- If a save fails, SOPHIE tells you why, and the panel stays open so nothing you typed is lost. For example: "Somebody else changed this SOP while you had it open. Nothing was saved — reload it and make the change again."
- Editing many standards at once? Use Bulk Edit instead.
- Answer SOPHIE's open questions here. Highlighted questions in a draft SOPHIE wrote are answered by editing the text. See Viewing a standard.
- Who can edit: editing needs a role with standards set to Edit ("Write and edit drafts") or higher in Settings › Roles. Deleting needs Manage ("Publish, approve, archive and delete").