Appearance
Patient Forms
What are patient forms?
Patient forms let you design questionnaires — intake forms, medical histories, consent confirmations — and send them to your patients to complete online. Patients open a secure link, confirm their date of birth, and fill the form in. Completed forms wait in a review queue: when a clinician approves one, the submission is added to the patient's notes, and any answers linked to your custom fields automatically update the patient's record.
All questions and answers are encrypted with the same field-level encryption used for the rest of your patient data.
Designing a form
Click Forms in the main menu, then Manage forms and Create form. A form is built from five kinds of element:
| Element | Description |
|---|---|
| Heading | A section title to organise the form. |
| Explainer text | A paragraph shown to the patient, useful for instructions or context. |
| Question | An input the patient completes. Choose a type (text, long text, date, yes/no, multiple choice, number) and whether an answer is required. Number questions can have a minimum, a maximum, a unit such as kg, and be limited to whole numbers. |
| Patient field | A question that asks for one of your custom fields. See below. |
| Consent checkbox | A statement with a checkbox the patient must tick to submit the form, useful for capturing consent to treatment or terms. |
Add elements with the buttons under the element list, drag them to reorder, and use the preview pane to see the form exactly as your patient will. When you add an element, the ones before it collapse to their title to keep the form easy to scan; click a title to open it again. A collapsed element that still needs details filling in is marked Incomplete. Remove elements with the bin icon.
Required questions are marked as required for the patient, and the form cannot be submitted until they are answered.
Adding patient fields
A question stands alone — its answer is simply shown wherever the submission is displayed. To collect information for the patient's record instead, use Add patient field and pick one of your custom fields. A patient field takes its wording, type, description and whether it is required from the custom field, and when the submission is approved the answer is written into the patient's custom data. The patient's record history shows that the change came from an approved form.
When a form is sent, each patient field is filled in with the value recorded for the patient at that moment, so they only need to check it and correct anything out of date. Re-sending a form refreshes these values from the record.
NOTE
Editing a form never affects forms that have already been sent: each send takes a snapshot of the form at that moment.
Sending a form to a patient
Open a patient's record and select the Forms tab, which is shown to users with the send patient forms permission (patient managers and clinical users by default). Click Send a form, pick the form, choose email and/or text message, and send. The patient receives a unique link.
IMPORTANT
Forms can only be sent by email once your practice has a reply-to address, so that patients can answer the message. A system administrator sets this in Settings → Email & SMS. Until then the Forms tab shows a warning and the email option is unavailable in the send dialog; text messages can still be sent.
Each request shows its status:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sent | The link has been sent to the patient. |
| Opened | The patient has confirmed their date of birth and viewed the form. |
| Awaiting review | The patient has submitted the form and it is waiting in the review queue. |
| Approved | A clinician approved the submission. |
| Rejected | A clinician rejected the submission. |
While a form has not yet been submitted you can re-send it (a fresh link and expiry, using the latest version of the form) or cancel the request, which disables the link straight away.
Link expiry and reminders
Form links expire after 30 days by default. A system administrator can change this to 7 or 14 days from Settings → Patient forms, and can optionally enable a reminder — patients who have not completed their form are reminded once, three days before their link expires, using the same channels the form was sent with.
Completion message
Once a patient submits a form they see a short thank-you message. A system administrator can change its wording in Settings → Patient forms, for example to tell patients what happens next.
How patients complete a form
Form names are for your team: patients see a generic Complete your form title, and the email or text message they receive doesn't include the form's name.
The patient's link asks them to confirm their date of birth before anything else is shown; this protects the form if the link is forwarded or intercepted. After verifying, they complete the form in one sitting and submit it. If a required question has been missed, the form says so and takes them to it. The link stops working once the form is submitted, expired or cancelled, or if the patient's record is deleted.
Locked links
If the date of birth is entered incorrectly 10 times, the link is locked and the patient is asked to contact the clinic. The person who sent the form is emailed so they can check the patient's details and re-send it, which issues a new link. Locked forms show a Locked label on the patient's Forms tab and on the Pending tab of Form submissions, and each incorrect attempt appears in the form's history.
Reviewing submissions
When a patient submits a form, it appears under Forms → Form submissions in the main menu, with a badge showing how many are waiting. Reviewing is limited to users with the review patient forms permission (clinical users by default).
The person who sent the form is emailed if they can review it; otherwise everyone who can review forms is emailed, so it is never missed. To keep patient details out of email, the message identifies the patient only by their record number and doesn't name the form.
Form submissions have a tab for each stage:
| Tab | Shows |
|---|---|
| Awaiting review | Submissions waiting for a clinician. |
| Pending | Forms still with patients, with when each link expires. Requests can be cancelled from here. |
| Completed | The 100 most recently approved submissions. |
| Rejected | The 100 most recently rejected submissions, for users who can view deleted notes. |
If the patient's record has record protection, you can only open, approve or reject their submission if you could open the record: the queue still lists the patient by name, but opening it asks for a reason (flexible protection) or is refused (strict protection).
The review screen shows every answer. Questions linked to custom fields are marked with the value currently recorded for the patient, so you can see exactly what approval will change.
- Approve — the submission is added to the patient's notes alongside their other entries (shown by the form's name; click it to see the answers), and linked answers update the patient's custom data. The patient's audit trail records that these changes came from the approved form.
- Reject — the answers are removed and nothing is written to the patient's record. A deleted entry remains visible in the patient's notes so the clinical record shows a form was submitted and removed; users with the view deleted notes permission can still open it, and rejected submissions stay listed on the queue's Rejected tab. The patient is not notified.
Approved submissions behave like any other note: users with the appropriate permissions can delete them from the timeline and restore them later. A deleted submission stays on the Completed tab and the patient's Forms tab with a Deleted label, and only users who can view deleted notes can open it. A submission still awaiting review can't be deleted; approve or reject it instead.
History
Each sent form keeps a history of what happened to it: when it was sent, re-sent or cancelled, when a reminder went out, when the patient opened and submitted it, and whether it was approved or rejected. Open it with the History button on the submission, on the patient's Forms tab, or on the Pending tab of Form submissions. History is available to users who can review forms.
Forms themselves keep a history too, recording when each one was created, edited, deleted or restored. Open it with the History button next to the form under Forms → Manage forms, or from the form's edit page. Deleted forms keep their history, which is available from the list of deleted forms.