Organizing Your Patients with Tags

Every clinic groups its patients in ways no EHR can guess ahead of time. Weight management cohorts, athletes, snowbirds, patients who still owe you a form, the ones you want to check on after the holidays. Tags let you label patients however your clinic actually works, and then find, filter, and message those groups later.

A tag is just a short label you create yourself. There is no setup, no list to configure first, and no limit on how many tags a patient can carry.

Where Tags Live

Open any patient chart and look at the left-hand column. Below the personal note you will find a Tags section with an "Add or create tags" field and, underneath it, every tag currently on that patient.

The same section appears on the patient's Drive and Billing screens, so you can tag someone without leaving what you were doing.

Adding a Tag

Click the "Add or create tags" field. SigmaMD suggests tags your clinic already uses, and the list narrows as you type.

If the tag you want is in the list, click it. If it is not, keep typing and choose the "Add tag:" option that appears with what you wrote. That creates the tag and applies it in one step.

There is no save button. Each tag is applied the moment you select it, and it is immediately available to everyone else in your clinic.

A tag can have:

• Up to 20 characters.
• Letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens, underscores, and periods. No accents or symbols like @, /, or &.
• Extra spaces at the start or end are trimmed automatically.
• A patient cannot carry the same tag twice, so re-adding one changes nothing.

Short tags work best. They appear as small badges in several places, and a long label gets hard to scan in a list.

Removing a Tag

Each tag on the patient shows as a badge with an ×. Click it to remove that tag from the patient. Removing it here does not affect any other patient who carries the same tag.

Tags are shared but not managed centrally. A tag exists as long as at least one patient has it, so once you remove it from the last patient, it stops appearing in the suggestions. This also means a misspelled tag cleans itself up once you correct it everywhere it was used.

Finding Patients by Tag

Go to Patients. The list has a Tags column showing each patient's tags, and the filter icon in that column header lets you select one or more tags to narrow the list.

Filtering by two tags returns patients who carry either one, which is what you usually want when you are pulling together a group to contact.

Sending a Broadcast to a Tag

Tags are one of the ways you can target a broadcast message. When you compose a broadcast, use the Tags field to select which tagged patients should receive it, and the recipient count updates as you choose.

This is where tags pay for themselves. Tag your diabetes education group once, and every future message to that group is two clicks away.

Tags in Command Center

When you look up a patient in quick search, their tags appear alongside their name in the results. It is a quick way to see who you are about to open without going into the chart.

Quick search matches on patient details, not on tag names. To pull up everyone with a given tag, use the Tags filter on the Patients list.

Exporting a Tagged Group

You can filter the Patients list by tag and then export it. The exported file contains exactly the patients you filtered to, though the tags themselves are not one of the columns in the file.

Tags through the Public API

If your clinic uses the SigmaMD Public API, tags are available there too. A patient's tags are included in their record, and patients can be filtered by tag. Your integration partner handles the details on their side.

A Few Things Worth Knowing

Tags are internal to your clinic. Patients never see them.

Everyone on your team sees the same set of tags and can add or remove them. Because tags are shared, it helps to agree on a small vocabulary early. Two people tagging the same group as "diabetes" and "Diabetes Care" ends up as two separate groups.

Tags are for organizing your panel, not for documenting care. Anything clinically meaningful belongs in the chart, where it becomes part of the medical record.

Thank you for your continued feedback. It plays a key role in shaping how SigmaMD evolves. If you have questions, our Help Center is a great place to start.