I go to the Past Medical History Box and enter:
NIDDM
HTN
etc.
Past Surgical History - Tonsillectomy, Cholecystectomy, etc.
Some offices just use the problem list as Past Medical but I think that makes a note too cluttered.
One thing I am going to try to force myself to do is to use the Health/Risk Factors with patients so things like diabetes, heart disease, tobacco, etc is codified as I think that will make it possible in the future to manipulate data - you can do the same with diagnosis codes and the new search functions, but I think using this will help particularly in the future.
