Fast SOAP notes with body diagrams for massage therapists

The idea

Massage therapists who bill insurance, treat personal-injury clients, or simply hold a licence in a strict state owe SOAP notes for every session. The reality is a therapist with 6 clients a day and 10 minutes between them, so notes get skipped, batched from memory on Sunday, or scrawled illegibly, and every one of those is a liability when an insurer audits or a board complaint lands.

Medical EHRs are priced and designed for physician practices; generic note apps are blank text boxes, which is precisely the problem. The wedge is the input method: therapists think spatially about bodies, so tapping a body map and having prose assembled from templates matches how they actually work. The interaction is the product, and it takes a month to build well.

Who pays

The therapist pays $12/month solo. The urgent buyers are LMTs billing insurance or taking personal-injury cases, where notes are a payment condition, followed by everyone quietly worried about board audits. Distribution runs through state massage association newsletters, continuing-education providers who teach documentation courses, and massage-therapist Facebook groups where documentation guilt is a recurring theme.

MVP scope

• Front/back SVG body diagrams with tap-to-annotate regions
• Quick-pick finding, technique, pressure, and pain inputs per region
• Template engine assembling taps into editable SOAP prose
• Locked, dated note history with addendum-only corrections
• Client list and per-region visual progress across sessions
• Skip for v1: scheduling, payments from clients, insurance claim submission, intake forms, and multi-therapist clinics

Build TapNotes, a SOAP note app for solo massage therapists, designed for a tablet between sessions. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, auth), Stripe for subscriptions.

Core flow: the therapist opens a client, taps New Note, and sees front and back body diagrams rendered as inline SVGs with roughly 40 tappable regions each (left upper trapezius, right lumbar paraspinals, etc.). Tapping a region opens a quick-pick panel: finding (hypertonicity, trigger point, adhesion, tenderness), technique applied (effleurage, deep tissue, myofascial release, cupping), pressure 1-5, and client-reported pain 0-10. Each annotation drops a marker on the diagram. A template engine assembles the taps into prose SOAP format: Subjective from a short free-text field plus pain scores, Objective from findings per region, Assessment and Plan from pick-lists with editable output. Target is a complete compliant note in under 60 seconds.

Pages: today's schedule-style client list, client history, the note editor, template phrase library (editable), locked-notes archive, settings, billing.

Non-obvious details: once signed, a note locks; corrections create an addendum with its own timestamp, never an edit, because board audits check for retroactive alteration. Store the SVG annotation coordinates so past notes re-render visually and progress across sessions is visible per region.

Pricing: $12/month solo plan, 30-day free trial, HIPAA-appropriate posture (encrypted at rest, BAA note on the site).