Patient intake forms

How intake works

New patients answer a health-history form once, before their first visit — current medications, allergies, past conditions and surgeries, family history, and habits like smoking. Their answers don't touch the chart by themselves: a staff member reviews the form first and decides what gets applied. Once applied, allergies and conditions land on the real chart, where prescribing safety checks can see them.

How patients fill it

Four ways, all leading to the same review:

• From the patient portal — a Health form tab, pre-filled with their last answers so a returning patient only updates what changed.
• From a link you send them — an invite delivered on WhatsApp (or copied and shared any way you like). The link is private to that patient, works once, and never shows their existing history — safe even if the message gets forwarded.
• At the front desk — anyone on the team can fill the form with the patient at check-in. Desk-filled forms apply to the chart immediately; the review step exists for answers the patient wrote unsupervised, not for your own staff.
• On paper — print a stack of blank forms and leave them at the desk, for the waiting room where three people fill theirs at once and nobody wants a link. Once a sheet comes back, enter it at the front desk the same as any desk-filled form.

Printing blank forms

Clinic Settings → Features → Patient intake forms has Print a blank form. It opens a plain sheet with the exact sections and questions the app asks — switch a section off and the paper stops asking about it too — plus a header for the patient's name, phone and file number, which is how a returned sheet finds its chart.

Choose the language before printing: English, Arabic, or both on one sheet (Arabic question with the English underneath), which is the one to print when you can't predict who walks in. The default follows the language you've set for patient messages.

What language patients see

The digital form opens in the language of the WhatsApp message that carried the link — your patient-messages setting — and falls back to your public-pages language. Every patient can switch between Arabic and English on the form itself, so a clinic that writes in Arabic never traps an English-reading patient.

Reviewing a form

Submitted forms wait on the Patient submissions page (also flagged on the dashboard) and on the patient's chart. Everyone can read them; applying or dismissing takes an owner, admin, doctor, or nurse.

The review shows every answer with the allergies and conditions pre-ticked — untick anything that shouldn't go on the chart, and choose whether the smoking and alcohol answers update the patient's file. Unticked items are not applied, but the form itself is never edited: everything the patient wrote stays visible in their intake history. Dismiss applies nothing and keeps the form on record the same way.

When answers get old

Health history goes stale. About a year after a patient's last applied form, their chart shows a Due for update badge — ask them to reconfirm through the portal, a fresh link, or at the desk. A patient who has never filled one shows Never taken.

Turning it on

An owner or admin enables Patient intake forms in Clinic Settings → Features (it needs an active subscription). The same place chooses which sections the form asks about — a clinic that doesn't want family history simply switches that section off. Women's health questions only ever appear for female patients. Forms submitted earlier stay readable even if the feature is later switched off.