About This Site
Where these teachings come from, who writes them, and how to tell us we got something wrong.
W. Proctor Harvey and the Georgetown tradition
Much of what is taught on this site, including how to write your consult notes, procedure notes, death notes, and the admission history and physical, and how to structure every note so that other people can read it, follow it, and trust the logic behind it, is based on the teachings of Watkins Proctor Harvey, MD, at Georgetown University Hospital, and of the physicians who trained under him and carried his method forward.
The format itself is older than any of us. For roughly the last hundred years this has been the commonly accepted structure of the medical note, refined by generations of physicians because it works. We value that format, and we do not want the electronic medical record to erode it under copied-forward text and auto-populated noise. We want the opposite: for it to keep improving and keep being used, because it remains the most tested, most respected, and easiest to use way to record what happened to a patient and what you plan to do about it.
That is him above, mid-sentence, doing the thing he was known for. Harvey was born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1918 and graduated from Duke University School of Medicine in 1943. He served in the Army Medical Corps in Europe during the Second World War, then interned at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital under Samuel A. Levine, becoming Levine's first cardiology fellow. In 1949 the two published Clinical Auscultation of the Heart together.
In 1950 he came to Georgetown and built the Division of Cardiology from nothing. He directed it for thirty-five years, until 1985. He created a fellowship program that other teaching hospitals copied, ran weekly teaching conferences using amplified heart sounds that became famous well beyond Washington, pioneered audiovisual teaching in cardiology, and designed an improved stethoscope. He served as President of the American Heart Association from 1969 to 1970, and he cared for at least four US presidents along with a long list of diplomats and members of Congress.
Harvey's central argument, made for four decades and increasingly against the current of his own profession, was that a careful history and a disciplined physical examination answer most questions, and that they answer them faster and more cheaply than the tests that were steadily replacing them. He was not a technophobe. He simply insisted that the examination came first, that it be done properly, and that the findings be recorded properly.
Georgetown's biography of him is here.
Why the lineage matters to a documentation site
It might look like a stretch to connect a cardiologist famous for auscultation to a website about writing admission notes. It is not.
The argument running through every page here is Harvey's argument, applied to the chart. The history is the most valuable thing you have, so take it properly and do not contaminate it. The examination is a discipline, so do it before you order the test rather than after. And the reasoning is the product, so write it down, because a plan without documented reasoning is indistinguishable from a guess.
That is why the HPI section is so insistent that the past medical history stays out of the history of present illness. It is why the assessment and plan is treated as the only part of the note that reflects a physician rather than a scribe. And it is why the charting guide argues that documenting your differential is worth more than documenting a normal exam you did not perform.
The material here comes from Harvey's publications, from the teaching of physicians who rounded with him at Georgetown, and from the ordinary accumulated experience of reading a great many notes on inpatient services since. Nothing on this site is a transcript of his lectures, and any errors in the translation are ours rather than his.
How this site came about, and why there is an Alo Academy
This site exists because of how badly it was needed and how completely it did not exist.
Mohammed Alo, DO, FACC, went through college and then through medical school rotations at a time when the resources a student needed were either locked in a library, priced for an attending's salary, or simply not written down anywhere. There was no question bank you could open on a phone between cases. There was no place to ask a fourth year what the surgery shelf actually tested. The tracker sheet you used on your medicine rotation was whatever the resident ahead of you had photocopied, and if it was bad you used it anyway, because there was nothing else. Every rotation began by rebuilding, from scratch and usually wrong, what the person before you had already worked out.
The one advantage he had was an odd one for a medical student. He had built websites professionally before medical school, at the point when the web was new enough that knowing how to make one was still an unusual skill. So he made one. Not as a business and not as a plan, but because the alternative was watching every class rediscover the same things.
It started as a place to put the tracker sheets so that anyone could print them. Then the calculators, because working out a corrected calcium on a scrap of paper at 3 a.m. is how errors happen. Then a place for students and residents to talk to each other and argue about cases. Then people started uploading shelf exam questions they had written, and explaining the answers to each other, and it turned out that the explanation was always the valuable part. That is the whole origin of every question bank on this site: students teaching each other, written down so the next class does not start from zero.
It grew into a full academy, which was never the intention and is a fairly direct consequence of the original one. What began as tracker sheets and a calculator is now more than sixty-six question banks, a library of clinical guides, a community, and a set of admissions and licensure resources that had nothing to do with medicine when they were first requested.
Membership on this site is a small fraction of what the commercial question banks charge, and the guides, the calculators, the tracker sheets and the community are free and always have been. That is a deliberate choice rather than a promotion. The problem this site was built to solve was that the resources existed and students could not get at them, and pricing it like everyone else would have reproduced the problem.
Every question in every bank is reviewed annually by Dr. Alo and a panel of specialist physicians, and rewritten when a blueprint changes, a guideline moves, or an explanation turns out to teach the wrong thing. The 2026 material is 2026 material. To be clear about what that does and does not mean: nothing on this site is a real exam item, and nobody here has access to one. These are original questions written in the style of each exam, kept current against the published blueprints, which is the only honest version of "up to date" that any third party bank can offer.
He teaches for a living in more than one sense. He is a professor of medicine at two medical schools, he has always practiced at large tertiary centers, and on any given day there is a team of residents, fellows and students behind him on rounds. If that sounds like the picture at the top of this page, that is not an accident. It is the same job.
The other teacher
Harvey is the tradition this site is built on. There is a second name that belongs here, and it is a more personal one.
Ali Tabrizchi, DO, FACC took Dr. Alo under his wing in Chicago and did the thing good mentors do, which is to raise the standard quietly and then expect you to meet it. He read. Not summaries and not slide decks, but textbooks and primary studies, and he taught from them on rounds, at the bedside, with the chart open. He gave lectures because he thought teaching was part of the job rather than an addition to it.
What Dr. Alo took from him was the whole method, and then pushed it one step further. Read the primary source. Teach from it on rounds. Give the lecture. And then, because a lecture reaches thirty people once and a recording reaches everyone forever, put it somewhere anyone can find it. That is why there is a YouTube channel full of lectures, years before recording them was a thing physicians did, and a blog that has been running ever since. It is also, fairly directly, why this site exists.
The conviction underneath all of it, that teaching should not be rationed by who happened to be standing in the room, came from him.
He died a few years ago, at 51, of a left sided colon cancer.
An interventional cardiologist spends a career standing beside a fluoroscopy beam, and the left side of the body takes most of the scatter. The people who knew him believe the years in the catheterization laboratory are why he got a cancer that a man of 51 has no business getting. Whether that is what caused his, specifically, is not something anyone can prove for one person, and this site is not going to dress a belief up as a finding. What is not in doubt is that occupational radiation exposure is a real hazard of that job, that it is measured in a career rather than in a case, and that the people who do this work take the question seriously for good reason.
He was 51. He had a lot of teaching left. This is some of it, passed along.
Who writes this site
The site is written and maintained by practicing physicians. The lead author is Mohammed Alo, DO, FACC, a board certified cardiologist and internist who has taught on hospital rounds daily since 2002; his full credentials are on the advisory board page. Every clinical page is written or reviewed by a board-certified physician before it goes up, and revised when practice moves.
Everything here has been used on real services with real trainees. It is opinionated on purpose. Where the site states a preference, such as putting each plan directly under its problem rather than separating the two lists, it says so and explains the reasoning rather than presenting a preference as a rule.
Editorial standards
Every clinical page is written or reviewed by a board-certified physician. Pages carry a last-reviewed date, and that date changes only when the content is actually reviewed, not when a typo is fixed.
Doses appearing on this site are teaching examples. They are chosen to be typical and defensible, not to substitute for a current reference or your institution's protocol. Verify every one before you use it.
When something here is wrong, it gets fixed rather than quietly deleted. Clinical practice moves, and several sections of this site have been revised because the underlying recommendation changed.
The site carries advertising to cover hosting. No advertiser has any input into the content, and no product on this site is recommended in exchange for anything.
The drug guide displays FDA-approved labeling supplied by the openFDA service and name matching from the National Library of Medicine. That data is theirs, not ours, and it can be incomplete or out of date.
How to use this site
It is free, it always has been, and there is nothing to sign up for. If you are a student or an intern, read the admission history and physical guide first and the common night calls guide before your first night on call. If you are further along, the charting and legal risk page is the one most people have never been taught.
Print the tracker sheets, use the calculators at the bedside, and send the link to anyone who needs it.
Found an error
If something here is wrong, out of date, or explained badly, say so. Corrections from students and residents are as welcome as corrections from attendings, and several pages exist in their current form because somebody wrote in.
Nothing on this site is medical advice. It is educational material for licensed clinicians and clinicians in training. It does not create a physician-patient relationship, it does not replace your institution's protocols or your attending's judgment, and it is not a substitute for a current clinical reference.