Patient narrative is the clinical story of a person's past and present medical history documented by a medical clinician.[32] The patient narrative can also be referred to as the medical history, the History and Physical (H & P), or the clinical narrative. The H&P includes a Subject, Objective, Assessment, and Plan (SOAP note), which summarizes the patient's narrative or history of medical illness, objectively reports the patient's clinical data and lab results, assesses diagnoses and prognoses, and often recommends how to address the patient's clinical situation. As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the government enacted the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which mandates that health providers transition from handwritten (typed) patient narratives to electronic patient narratives in forms such as the electronic medical record (EMR) or the electronic health record (EHR).[33] The EMR and EHR are of interest to communication scholars because they economize the words and space of the traditional patient narrative into a structured system of navigation screens and checkboxes.