Your symptom tracker is not the thing you give your doctor. The thing you give your doctor is one page made out of it.
That distinction is where most carefully kept logs fall apart. People spend three months recording every meal, every bathroom trip and every ache, arrive at a fifteen-minute appointment with 90 days of rows on a phone screen, and watch the clinician glance at it, nod, and carry on with the questions they were always going to ask. It is a demoralising moment, and it is almost never about the quality of the tracking. It is about the format of the handover.
This guide is about that handover: what a clinician can actually use, which scales they already recognise without explanation, what a chart has to look like to be read in a ten-minute slot, how to physically hand it over so it ends up in your notes, and what should stay out of the document and go into the conversation instead. If you want help deciding what to record in the first place, how to keep a food diary for IBS covers the mechanics, and how to prepare for a GI doctor appointment covers the run-up. This post starts at the point where the data already exists.
The short answer: one page, one question, three numbers
If you do nothing else, produce a single side of A4 that carries three things.
First, three numbers with a comparison built in. Not "I go a lot", but "average 5.2 bowel movements a day over the last four weeks, against 2.1 in June". Not "the pain is bad", but "pain on 22 of the last 30 days, 14 of them rated moderate or severe". A number without a baseline is an adjective wearing a costume. A number with a baseline is evidence of change, and change is what triggers a decision.
Second, a shape. One small line graph showing the main measure over time, with the dates of anything that changed marked on it: a new medication, a course of steroids, a holiday, a gastrointestinal infection. The shape is what tells a clinician whether you are deteriorating, stable, or already recovering by the time you reached the clinic.
Third, the question. Written at the top, in one sentence, in plain words. "I want to know whether this counts as a flare." "I want to know whether the dose change did anything." "I want to know whether this warrants repeating the calprotectin." Without it, your page is a report. With it, your page is a request, and requests get answered.
Why a long export gets set aside
Not because your clinician does not care. Because of arithmetic.
A systematic review covering more than 28 million consultations in 67 countries found average primary care consultation length ranging from 48 seconds in Bangladesh to 22.5 minutes in Sweden, with 18 countries representing around half the global population getting five minutes or less (Irving 2017). Gastroenterology outpatient slots are usually longer than a GP slot, but a follow-up appointment in the 10 to 20 minute range is normal, and that window has to hold the history, the examination, the plan, the prescription and the typing.
The typing is the part people underestimate. A direct observational time and motion study of 57 US physicians across four specialties found they spent 27.0% of the office day on direct clinical face time with patients and 49.2% on electronic health record and desk work, with another one to two hours of record work most evenings (Sinsky 2016). That study was conducted and funded by the American Medical Association, a physician professional body with an interest in documenting clinician burden, which is worth knowing when you read the numbers. Even discounting for that, the picture is a system where unallocated reading time does not exist.
So a 40-page PDF is not competing with attention. It is competing with the next patient. This is not a reason to track less. It is the reason the summary has to do the work.
What a clinician is actually looking for
They are not reading your log as a story. They are running it against a small set of questions, and anything that does not touch one of them is noise.
For suspected or diagnosed IBS, the questions are roughly: has the pattern changed, does the pain relate to defaecation, what is the predominant stool form, is there anything that should not be here (bleeding, weight loss, night-time waking, anaemia, new onset after 50), and is a treatment worth trying or changing. The ACG guideline frames IBS diagnosis as a positive process built on symptom criteria plus limited testing rather than an open-ended exclusion exercise (Lacy 2021), and the BSG guideline takes the same structured approach (Vasant 2021). Your log's job is to answer those questions faster than an interview could.
For Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, the questions are about disease activity and whether the current treatment is holding. The international treat-to-target framework, STRIDE-II, sets symptomatic relief and normalisation of blood and stool markers as short-term targets and clinical remission plus endoscopic healing as longer-term ones (Turner 2021). If your page reports the exact items that feed those targets, it slots into an existing decision. If it reports bloating scores and food photographs, it does not.
This is also why your log will not settle everything. Patient-reported symptoms are an imperfect proxy for inflammation. In a cohort of 356 people with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, clinical disease activity was associated with mucosal inflammation in UC but not in Crohn's, the Harvey-Bradshaw index was a poor predictor of mucosal inflammation, and symptom reporting was associated with anxiety, depression and somatisation scores (Gracie 2016). Separately, among people with UC whose colonoscopy showed healing, a quarter or more still reported increased stool frequency, while far fewer reported bleeding (Colombel 2017). A good log gets you a better conversation and a better-aimed test. It does not replace the test. Guidelines for UC lean on faecal calprotectin and other biomarkers alongside symptoms for exactly this reason (Singh 2023, Rubin 2025).
Use the scales they already score
The single highest-yield change you can make to a symptom tracker is to record in the units your clinician already uses. It removes a translation step, and translation steps are where handovers die.
Bristol stool form. The seven-type picture scale published by Lewis and Heaton in 1997 was validated against whole-gut transit time, with looser types corresponding to faster transit (Lewis 1997). Later work found the same thing in children: stool consistency, and not frequency, correlated with total gastrointestinal transit time (Russo 2013). NICE guidance explicitly suggests showing people the Bristol Stool Form Scale to help them describe their bowel habit, and goes further by setting Bristol type 4 as the target when titrating a laxative or an antimotility drug (NICE CG61). That is the clearest possible illustration of a scale that plugs straight into a decision: if your log says "mostly type 6, two or three type 7 days a week", a clinician can act on it without asking you a single clarifying question. If your log is full of those days, what Bristol stool type 6 actually means sets out what the number does and does not tell them.
IBS Severity Scoring System (IBS-SSS). Five items covering pain severity, number of days with pain, bloating severity, dissatisfaction with bowel habit and interference with life, scored out of 500 (Francis 1997). It has been the workhorse severity measure in IBS trials since, which means the number carries meaning to anyone who reads IBS literature. Score it every two to four weeks rather than daily; it is a change detector, not a diary entry.
Harvey-Bradshaw Index (HBI). The simplified Crohn's activity index published in 1980, built from general wellbeing, abdominal pain, number of liquid stools, abdominal mass and complications (Harvey 1980). Two of its five items need a clinician, so a self-scored version is partial by definition. Say so on the page rather than letting it look complete. Our guide to reading a Harvey-Bradshaw Index score goes through the bands and the items behind them.
PRO-2. In Crohn's disease, a two-item patient-reported measure derived from the CDAI diary card items for stool frequency and abdominal pain (Khanna 2015). In ulcerative colitis, the analogous PRO-2 combines stool frequency and rectal bleeding, developed from the Mayo score for use in trials (Jairath 2015). Both were built precisely because regulators wanted patient-reported endpoints, which makes them unusually well suited to being reported by a patient.
SCCAI. The Simple Clinical Colitis Activity Index, five clinical criteria that correlated strongly with more complex indices and with laboratory markers of severity (Walmsley 1998). It captures urgency, which PRO-2 leaves out. How do I know if my ulcerative colitis is flaring walks through scoring it yourself.
IBD-Control. A short generic questionnaire designed specifically because existing IBD instruments were felt to lack relevance to day-to-day decisions or were too cumbersome for routine clinics (Bodger 2014). If your clinic already uses it, filling it in before you arrive is the most frictionless possible handover.
UK IBD guidance supports the routine use of patient-reported measures alongside objective markers in structured IBD care (Lamb 2019).
Why "pain 7 out of 10" travels worse than you think
Homemade scales feel precise and are not, for two reasons.
The first is that nobody else knows what your 7 means. A 7 recorded by someone who has never had a kidney stone and a 7 recorded by someone who has are not the same measurement, and there is no way for a reader to calibrate.
The second is drift. Over a long log, your own anchor moves. Six months into a bad patch, what you would once have called an 8 quietly becomes a 5, because the scale rescales itself around the worst thing you have recently felt. A trend line built on a drifting scale can show improvement that is entirely an artefact of getting used to it.
This is not an argument for abandoning subjective ratings. It is an argument for anchoring them. Two anchors that survive contact with a clinician:
- Function, not feeling. "Pain that stopped me leaving the house" and "pain I worked through" are categories that mean the same thing to everyone. Days-per-month counts of those categories are far more transferable than an average severity score.
- Pictures over numbers where a picture exists. Bristol types are the obvious case. A type 6 is a type 6 whoever is looking.
A recurring frustration in the IBS community is tracking that produces nothing usable. One r/ibs thread describes logging with an app while eating a restricted diet and finding that essentially everything correlated with every symptom at 100%, which the poster described as a pointless exercise. That is a real limitation of automated trigger detection on small, repetitive datasets, and it is covered in how to find out what triggers my IBS. For the purposes of this post, the lesson is narrower: those percentages are not the thing to hand over.
The chart format that survives a ten-minute slot
There is actual research on this, and it is refreshingly specific.
A mixed-methods study randomised cancer patients and clinicians to evaluate different formats for displaying patient-reported outcome data. For individual-level data, which is what your log is, both groups rated line graphs highest for ease of understanding and usefulness, and selected them as easiest to understand (50% of patients, 70% of clinicians) and most useful (62% and 80%). Qualitative interviews supported highlighting scores that need clinical attention and providing reference values. Clinicians wanted more statistical detail than patients did for group-level research data, but for one person's scores over time, the simple line graph won for everyone (Brundage 2015).
A companion literature review found only nine empirical studies addressing how patient-reported outcome data should be presented at all, and concluded that interpretation accuracy, personal preference and perceived understanding often diverge: people can prefer a format they read less accurately (Bantug 2016). That is a useful warning about your own judgement of your own charts.
Translated into practice:
| Format | How it reads in a short appointment |
|---|---|
| Line graph, one measure, time on the x-axis | Best. Direction is visible in under two seconds |
| Line graph with a reference line (your baseline, or a threshold) | Better still. The reader does not have to hold a comparison in their head |
| Events marked on the timeline (medication start, infection, steroid course) | High value. Turns a shape into a cause-and-effect question |
| Bar chart of counts per week | Usable, especially for bowel movements per day or days with blood |
| Calendar heatmap | Mixed. Pretty, and slower to read than a line |
| Pie chart of stool types | Poor. Loses time, which is the whole point |
| Correlation table or "top triggers" percentages | Usually the wrong thing to hand over. Unvalidated, easy to over-read |
| Raw daily rows | Reference material, not a handover. Keep it available, do not lead with it |
Two more rules from the same literature. Keep the y-axis honest and fixed, because a rescaled axis makes small changes look dramatic. And label the axis in the units the scale actually uses: "bowel movements per day", not "score".
Clairop logs meals, symptoms and stool in seconds, then looks for the foods your gut reacts to, including reactions that land days later.
A worked example: the same twelve weeks, two hand-overs
Two people with ulcerative colitis, both twelve weeks post dose escalation, both diligent trackers, both at a 15-minute follow-up.
Person A opens their app and scrolls. There are 84 daily entries, each with food, stool times, a 0 to 10 pain rating, mood, sleep hours and free-text notes. They start at week one and narrate forward. At minute four the clinician interrupts to ask how many times a day they are going now, and whether there is blood. Person A does not know the average and has to scroll to check. The appointment proceeds as an interview, and the log contributes almost nothing.
Person B hands over one sheet, printed, and says one sentence: "Twelve weeks since the dose change. My stool frequency has come down but the bleeding has not, and I want to know if that means the dose change has failed."
The sheet has, in this order:
- A one-line provenance note: patient-recorded at home, daily, 22 June to 14 September. No missing weeks.
- The question, written out.
- Three numbers: mean 4.1 bowel movements per day in the last two weeks, against 6.8 in the fortnight before the dose change; blood present on 9 of the last 14 days, against 12 of 14 before; two nights a week waking to open bowels, unchanged.
- A line graph of bowel movements per day with a horizontal reference line at their own remission baseline, and a vertical marker at the dose change.
- A self-scored SCCAI, with a note that the general wellbeing item is subjective and no examination was involved.
- Medication: 79 of 84 days taken, five missed, all in one week during a house move.
- The most recent faecal calprotectin result and its date.
The clinician reads it in roughly forty seconds and now has a specific clinical picture: partial response with persistent bleeding and unchanged nocturnal symptoms. That is a recognisable pattern that usually prompts a specific next step rather than a wait-and-see. The rest of the appointment is about the decision rather than about assembling the facts.
Person A tracked just as carefully as Person B. The difference was entirely in the artifact.
A thread in r/UlcerativeColitis asking how people track their UC shows both instincts in the community. Several posters describe long-running spreadsheets with columns for stool frequency, consistency, blood, pain and medication, and one describes plotting it and going through the graph with their gastroenterologist, who noticed a sharp drop in blood and stool consistency. Others describe apps that can export several months of data as a chart for the doctor. The consistent theme in the replies that ended well is that something was plotted, not that something was exported.
What belongs on the page, and what belongs in the conversation
There is good evidence that cramming more into a visit costs you.
An observational study coding 189 outpatient encounters and re-interviewing patients a week later found that 49% of decisions and recommendations were recalled accurately without prompting, 36% with a prompt, and 15% recalled wrongly or not at all. In a multivariate model, the total number of items to be recalled per visit and the proportion of the decision-making talk done by the clinician were both significant predictors of poorer recall, and the item count hurt recall more for patients with less formal education (Laws 2018).
That cuts both ways. Yes, it argues for writing things down rather than relying on memory. It also argues for keeping the number of live items small, because a visit stuffed with fifteen topics leaves you remembering fewer of the answers.
A reasonable split:
On the page (durable facts that should end up in the record):
- Dates and completeness of the log
- Averages with a comparison period
- Stool form in Bristol numbers
- Days with blood, days with night-time symptoms, days off work or study
- Any validated score, with its name and the date range it covers
- Medication taken and missed, with the pattern of missing
- Recent test results and their dates
- Red flag symptoms, listed plainly and early
In the conversation (things that need a human reaction, not filing):
- What you are most frightened of
- What you want to be able to do again
- What you have already tried and abandoned, and why
- Anything sensitive that you want said rather than written
- Your one question
That last point matters. Global survey work in ulcerative colitis found meaningful communication gaps between what patients and physicians each believed was being discussed, including around symptom burden and the impact on daily life (Rubin 2021). A written page is good at carrying counts. It is bad at carrying that a symptom has changed what your life looks like. Say that part out loud. How to explain IBS to a doctor covers the wording for the spoken half.
How to actually hand it over
Format and delivery are separate problems, and most people solve only the first.
Send something ahead if there is a route. Many clinics have a patient portal message function or an IBD nurse inbox. If your service runs a remote monitoring platform, that route already exists, and our guide to IBD symptom tracker apps and what the evidence says explains how those differ from the trackers you download. A short message a few days before, with the summary attached or pasted, means the reading happens outside the appointment instead of inside it. Keep the message itself to a few lines, with the detail attached.
Bring a paper copy anyway. This is the part people skip. Qualitative work on electronic patient-generated data in safety-net health systems found that use was shaped by capability, motivation and opportunity factors at the patient, clinician, system and policy levels, including resource availability and implementation process, and that barriers persist where those are not addressed (Khoong 2025). A scoping review of 53 studies on integrating patient-generated health data into shared decision-making identified barriers spanning the patient-provider relationship, organisational factors, medical ethics and law, data-driven workflow, and design and technology (Pakianathan 2026). In plain terms: your app almost certainly cannot write into their record system, and a phone screen cannot be filed. Paper can be scanned.
Ask the filing question out loud. "Can this go in my notes?" takes three seconds and changes what happens to the document. If it is scanned in, the next clinician you see, who may not be this one, starts from your baseline instead of from scratch. If it is not, it was a prop.
Hand it over at the start, not the end. A summary produced in the last two minutes is a document that arrives after the decision. Give it over as you sit down, with your one sentence.
Do not read it aloud. Let them read it. Reading is faster than listening, and narrating your own summary converts a forty-second task into a four-minute one.
Keep the raw data accessible but closed. Have the full log on your phone in case you are asked something specific. Do not open it unprompted.
Work designing a patient-generated health data app for primary care visits with older adults living with chronic pain reached similar conclusions through user-centred design: the value is in what gets surfaced for the visit, not in the volume collected (Gibson 2026).
Does handing over data change anything? The honest answer
It helps communication more reliably than it helps symptoms, and you should go in expecting the first rather than the second.
The largest synthesis is a Cochrane review of 116 randomised trials and 49,785 patients on routinely feeding patient-reported outcome measurements back to clinicians and patients. It found that feedback probably improves patient-physician communication (standardised mean difference 0.36), diagnosis and notation (risk ratio 1.73), and disease control (risk ratio 1.25), with a small improvement in quality of life (standardised mean difference 0.15). It found probably little or no difference for general health perceptions, social functioning and pain, and the authors noted that it is unclear whether many of these improvements are clinically meaningful or sustainable (Gibbons 2021). Certainty of evidence ranged from very low to moderate.
The most striking positive trial is in oncology, and its design is the instructive part. Patients receiving outpatient chemotherapy were randomised to report 12 common symptoms via tablet or to usual care. Treating physicians received symptom printouts at visits, and nurses received email alerts when severe or worsening symptoms were reported. Quality of life improved in more of the intervention group, emergency room visits were less frequent (34% versus 41%), patients stayed on chemotherapy longer, and 75% of the intervention group were alive at one year against 69% with usual care (Basch 2016), with the overall survival result reported separately (Basch 2017). Note what carried the effect: not the collecting, but the routing. Somebody was alerted, and somebody acted.
The follow-up multi-practice trial was more modest. In PRO-TECT, across 52 US community oncology practices and 1,191 patients, weekly electronic symptom surveys improved physical function, symptom control and health-related quality of life at three months, but the mean improvements were around 2.5 points on a 0 to 100 scale, and the authors said these findings should be interpreted provisionally pending the primary overall survival outcome, which was not yet available at publication (Basch 2022).
In IBD specifically, the picture is similar. The myIBDcoach pragmatic randomised trial in 909 Dutch patients found that telemedicine-supported self-management reduced outpatient visits (1.55 versus 2.34 over 12 months) and hospital admissions, while patient-reported quality of care was high and essentially identical in both arms, and flares, steroid courses, emergency visits and surgeries did not differ (de Jong 2017). The trial was funded by Maastricht University Medical Centre and Ferring, a pharmaceutical company with products in gastroenterology, which is worth stating where an efficiency finding is concerned.
An umbrella review of nine systematic reviews of digital health technologies in IBD was blunter: digital health technology was not directly beneficial in achieving or maintaining clinical remission, though in four trials it was associated with fewer hospital attendances and better treatment adherence, supporting a role as an adjunct rather than a treatment (Gasparetto 2025). Several of that review's authors declare payments from pharmaceutical companies, and one is a non-paid board member of the foundation that owns myIBDcoach's content, which they disclose.
So the fair summary: tracking and handing over data is a communication tool with decent evidence behind it, and an adherence and service-use tool with some evidence behind it. Anyone telling you that tracking itself will reduce your symptoms is going further than the evidence does.
Why your tracker's insights page is not the handover
Most consumer tracking apps have a screen that ranks your suspected triggers by percentage or shows correlation strength. It is the most tempting thing to show a clinician, and it is usually the least useful.
Three reasons.
It is unvalidated. These rankings are produced by proprietary calculations that have not, in general, been tested against anything. A percentage with no method behind it looks like a measurement and is not one.
It multiplies chances. If you log 40 foods against 6 symptoms, you are running 240 informal comparisons, and some will look meaningful purely by chance. How to keep a food diary for IBS covers the arithmetic of that in detail.
It confuses the ask. Handing over a trigger list implicitly asks your clinician to adjudicate your dietary conclusions, which is a slow conversation with low yield. Handing over a trend line asks them about disease activity, which is fast and high yield.
There is a legitimate place for food data in a gastroenterology appointment, but it is narrow: a specific, repeatable, clearly timed reaction worth testing formally, or a pattern of restriction that has got wide enough to warrant a dietitian referral. Both of those fit in one sentence.
One related point on data quality. Compliance research is uncomfortable reading for anyone relying on a paper diary filled in later. In a study of chronic pain patients issued either an instrumented paper diary or an electronic one, participants returned paper cards corresponding to 90% of assigned times, but electronic records showed actual compliance was 11%, and on 32% of study days the paper binder was never opened even though reported compliance for those days exceeded 90%. Electronic diary compliance was 94% (Stone 2003, summarised in Stone 2002). That does not mean paper is useless, and it does not mean your paper diary is fiction. It does mean that a log reconstructed from memory at the end of the week is a different kind of evidence from one recorded at the time, and it is honest to say which yours is.
What to put on the page, by condition
The structure is the same; the contents are not.
| IBS | Crohn's disease | Ulcerative colitis | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core count | Bowel movements per day, days with pain | Liquid stools per day, days with abdominal pain | Bowel movements per day above your own normal, days with blood |
| Form | Bristol type, predominant and range | Bristol type | Bristol type, plus urgency |
| Named score | IBS-SSS every 2 to 4 weeks | Self-scored HBI, flagged as partial | Self-scored PRO-2 or SCCAI |
| The thing people omit | Days the symptoms changed plans | Fatigue, and any obstructive symptoms such as vomiting or distension after eating | Urgency and incontinence episodes, which PRO-2 does not capture |
| Objective anchor | Most recent calprotectin or coeliac serology, with dates | Most recent calprotectin, CRP, imaging | Most recent calprotectin, haemoglobin, ferritin |
| Do not lead with | Trigger percentages | A list of foods | A list of foods |
For Crohn's, how to tell if you are in a Crohn's flare covers what actually distinguishes a flare from the things that imitate one, which is the context your numbers land in.
If you are still undiagnosed, your page changes shape. The most valuable items become: when it started and what you were doing at the time, whether it began after a gastrointestinal infection or a course of antibiotics, the single clearest description of the pain and its relationship to opening your bowels, the Bristol range, and any red flag symptom stated plainly and first. What a pre-diagnosis page should not contain is your own differential diagnosis. Listing the conditions you have researched tends to shift the conversation onto adjudicating your theories rather than characterising your symptoms.
Myths about bringing a symptom tracker to your doctor
"More data is more convincing." It is the other way round. Volume transfers the summarising work to someone who has no time for it, and unsummarised data is the most common reason a log is set aside.
"If my doctor does not look at it, they do not care." Sometimes true, often not. The realistic constraint is a fully committed clinic day and a record system that cannot ingest your file (Sinsky 2016, Khoong 2025). Change the format once before you change the clinician.
"A symptom log can prove I have IBD, or prove I do not." It cannot. Symptoms correlate imperfectly with inflammation in both directions, which is why guidelines pair them with calprotectin and other markers (Gracie 2016, Colombel 2017, Singh 2023).
"Tracking will improve my symptoms." The evidence does not support that as a standalone claim. Feedback of patient-reported data improves communication and documentation reliably; effects on symptoms are small or absent (Gibbons 2021), and in IBD, digital tools were not directly beneficial for achieving or maintaining remission (Gasparetto 2025).
"Scoring myself on a clinical index is overstepping." Two of these instruments, PRO-2 in Crohn's and in UC, exist specifically because regulators wanted patient-reported endpoints (Khanna 2015, Jairath 2015). Reporting is your part. Interpreting is theirs.
"I need an app to do this properly." You need a summary. A spreadsheet, a notes app or a sheet of paper with a hand-drawn line on it all work. The r/UlcerativeColitis tracking thread is mostly spreadsheets, and one poster describes going through their own graph with their gastroenterologist.
"I should track everything in case it turns out to matter." Tracking everything is the main reason people stop tracking. Pick the handful of items that answer your question and let the rest go.
When not to wait for the appointment
A symptom tracker is for planned care. Some things should not wait for it.
See a doctor promptly if you have: new or increasing rectal bleeding; unexplained weight loss; a fever alongside gut symptoms; symptoms that wake you at night; symptoms of anaemia such as breathlessness, unusual fatigue or pallor; new bowel symptoms starting after age 50; a family history of bowel cancer or inflammatory bowel disease alongside new symptoms; or persistent vomiting, severe abdominal distension or an inability to pass wind, which can indicate an obstruction.
If you have IBD and are having a significant increase in stool frequency or bleeding, contact your IBD team rather than waiting for your next clinic date. If you are in severe pain, passing large amounts of blood, or feeling faint, seek urgent care.
The same principle holds in reverse. If something alarming happens, write it down with the date and the detail while it is fresh, and put it at the top of your page, not buried in the log. Red flags are the one category where placement genuinely changes what gets acted on.
The honest bottom line
The gap between people who feel heard in gastroenterology appointments and people who do not is not usually a gap in how carefully they tracked. It is a gap in what they brought.
The tracking is the raw material. The handover is the product. One page, a named score, a line with a baseline on it, medication adherence, the most recent objective test, and a single written question. Sent ahead where there is a route, printed as a backup, handed over at the start with one sentence, and offered for the notes.
Everything else can live on your phone in case you are asked.
If you keep a log in Clairop, its GI visit report is built for this handover: one page carrying a score trend, bowel pattern against your own baseline, days with blood, overnight episodes, medication adherence and lab results, with a note that the data is patient-entered sitting above the numbers rather than in a footnote. You can see how it is put together on how it works. Whether you use that, a spreadsheet, or a sheet of paper matters much less than whether you summarise before you hand anything over.
