PatientLead Navigator
Canonical Terms
These terms are the shared language of the Navigator. They name predictable system features so you can recognize patterns faster, and stop spending energy trying to solve structural constraints with personal effort.
Use
This is a vocabulary page. It supports interpretation and communication clarity. It is not clinical guidance.
Navigator system terms
How the Navigator is built
These definitions describe the Navigator’s internal building blocks. They help you understand what each element is for, what it produces, and why the program keeps returning to the same tools across different months.
Interactive
Thinking surface
A short, bounded exercise that helps you notice, separate, name, or sort something you are experiencing. Interactives are designed to reduce cognitive load and produce small, usable outputs, for example, labels, flags, or short phrases.
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A durable, human legible record that preserves what you have established so far. Artifacts are designed to survive time and context shifts. They summarize, stabilize, and make your reasoning portable for future you and, when useful, for clinical communication.
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Framework
Integration layer
The integration layer that connects artifacts into a coherent decision system. The framework is not a single document. It is the set of stable concepts and thresholds that help you interpret new events without restarting from zero.
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Output
What you take forward
The specific result produced by an interactive, tool, or artifact. Outputs are intentionally small. They are designed to be portable, for example, a labeled pattern, a chosen priority, a calibrated threshold, or a short piece of record ready language.
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A small output that is intentionally designed to grow into a larger structure later. Seeds reduce effort later in the program by preventing re explanation and re sorting. They are the bridge between today’s clarity and future artifacts.
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The boundary that determines whether a tool’s saved output is global to Navigator or specific to one program. Navigator scope is reusable across conditions. Program scope is tied to a specific condition program.
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Working Set
Current month stack
The small bundle of tools, prompts, and outputs that the program is actively using in the current phase. A working set keeps the program from feeling like a library. It is the curated subset that matters right now.
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Rapid Access Surface
Fast recall
A condensed view designed for fast retrieval when your capacity is low. It surfaces the few pieces of framework level synthesis you most need in the moment, without requiring you to re read full pages.
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Record Facing Language
Documentation ready
Phrases designed to fit the medical record. Record facing language aims for clarity, specificity, and low interpretive risk. It helps you communicate without over explaining or triggering predictable dismissal patterns.
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A short statement of what the program is trying to make true for you by a certain point. Claims are used internally to keep the program coherent. They prevent random advice. They also provide a quality check for each month’s deliverables.
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Portability
Condition safe
The design standard that ensures tools and artifacts can transfer across conditions without importing the wrong condition language. Portability is achieved by keeping condition specificity in surface examples while preserving shared logic underneath.
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The record and system memory
Functional Accuracy
Record standard
The standard to which medical records are held. Records are designed to satisfy billing, liability, and basic clinical safety, for example, “Is this a stroke.” They are not designed to capture your full lived experience.
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Institutional Memory
System memory
The collective “knowledge” a healthcare system has of you. In fragmented systems, this memory resets frequently, forcing you to reconstruct your history from scratch.
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Documentation Drift
Copy and compression
The process by which nuance is lost as records are copied, pasted, and summarized across different providers, often resulting in a flattened or inaccurate version of your history. The Meaning Drift Check tool in Month 2 detects this pattern in specific notes.
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Alignment Effect
Credibility mechanism
The structural dynamic in which your credibility is assessed based on how closely your spoken account matches what appears in the chart. When your description aligns with the record, you are heard. When it diverges, even if you are correct and the record is wrong, the record is typically trusted over you.
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Copy-Forward
Error propagation
The mechanism by which a note from one encounter is copied into subsequent records, carrying any errors, imprecise language, or misleading framing forward into the permanent chart. Once an inaccurate statement enters a note, copy-forward embeds it as established fact.
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Diagnostic Drift
Label erosion
The process by which a confirmed diagnosis degrades as it moves through successive records and providers. A specific diagnosis like hemiplegic migraine may be compressed into "history of migraine" or "intermittent neurological complaints," losing the clinical specificity that protects against repeated workup.
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The burden of navigation
Explanatory Labor
Unpaid work
The unpaid, cognitive work you perform to bridge gaps in a provider’s knowledge or a system’s fragmented records.
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Compression Loop
Structural cycle
The self-reinforcing cycle in which compressed visit time produces compressed notes, and those compressed notes shape the framing and time allocation of the next visit. Preparation effort gets absorbed by the loop rather than changing outcomes because the structural constraints that created the compression remain in place.
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Credibility Drift
Perception erosion
The gradual erosion of how seriously your account is taken across encounters. Each dismissive note, vague psychological framing, or documentation error that enters the chart can shift how future providers perceive you before you speak. Credibility drift is cumulative and often invisible until a new clinician treats your history as unreliable.
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Psychological Misattribution
Framing violation
The pattern in which neurological symptoms are reframed as psychological in origin without supporting evidence. In hemiplegic migraine care, this commonly appears as chart language suggesting anxiety, conversion disorder, or functional neurological disorder when the actual presentation is consistent with the confirmed diagnosis.
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System dynamics
Administrative Filter
Gatekeeping function
The function of referrals and gatekeeping. Rather than pathways to care, they often act as filters designed to manage institutional resources and costs.
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Monitoring Tax
Ongoing cost
The sustained cognitive cost of watching for documentation errors, insurance denials, referral failures, and care gaps between appointments. The monitoring tax is distinct from both the illness burden and the effort of individual encounters. It is the standing cost of maintaining vigilance over a system that does not reliably self-correct.
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IV
Impact and sustainability
Selective Engagement
Energy strategy
The advocacy strategy of choosing when to push for care and when to pull back to conserve energy, based on your current capacity and the likely yield of the encounter. The Navigator operationalizes this through a push, pause, or disengage decision frame.
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Preparation Ceiling
Standing rule
A fixed limit on how much time and effort you invest in preparing for any single appointment. The preparation ceiling prevents unlimited escalation of pre-visit work and protects against the belief that enough preparation will guarantee a good outcome. Once set, it functions as a standing rule rather than a per-visit decision.
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Insight-vs-Labor Boundary
Recognition limit
The threshold at which understanding a system pattern stops reducing your burden and starts creating new obligation. Recognizing that a note contains a documentation error is insight. Feeling responsible for correcting every error in every note crosses into labor. This boundary prevents structural awareness from becoming another unpaid task.
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Vigilance Limit
Sustainability rule
A standing rule that defines when active system monitoring is warranted and when it should be suspended. The vigilance limit distinguishes between windows that require attention, such as after a provider transition or during an active authorization dispute, and stable periods where monitoring can safely drop to background awareness.
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How to use this index
A fast structural reset after friction
This is your structural defense. When you feel that familiar spike of frustration after a difficult ER visit or a stalled referral, look at this list.
Finding the term for what is happening, such as a Compression Loop or Credibility Drift, re-centers the problem where it belongs, in the system's design.
It allows you to say, "I am not failing; I am experiencing a predictable system feature."
If you want a quick starting point: identify the category first, then choose the closest term. After that, decide whether this encounter deserves engagement now, or whether Selective Engagement is the better call today.