Patient Communications | Forms and Intake

Patient Communications lets patients complete questionnaires and intake in the patient portal before a visit. Staff assign forms from the patient's chart, or each visit type sends its own set automatically before the appointment. Patients work through everything in one guided form, their progress saves as they go, and their answers land in the chart when they submit. This guide is part of Patient Communications.

Overview

• Staff assign questionnaires and intake sections from the Forms tab of the Patient Communications panel in the chart.

• Admins choose, on the Pre-Visit Forms tab of Notifications Admin, which intake sections, questionnaires, and consents each visit type sends before the visit.

• Patients open Forms in the portal menu, or a link in a text or email, and complete everything in one step-by-step form.

• Answers go into the chart: questionnaires into the visit note, patient-reported history as draft entries for a provider to review, and demographics into the patient's profile.

• Staff are told when a patient submits, with a task and an optional email. See Messaging and Tasks.

Before you begin

• Questionnaires must be active to be offered. Intake is a built-in questionnaire called Patient Intake that the plugin installs; keep it active.

• Demographics such as gender identity, race, preferred language, and emergency contact need the FHIR_* plugin secrets to be saved. See Patient Communications.

• Texts and emails need Twilio and SendGrid set up, and the campaigns below turned on.

Intake sections

Intake is made of sections you can send together or on their own:

For conditions, surgeries, medications, allergies, goals, and vitals, the patient also sees what is already on file, read-only, so they only add what's missing.

Assign forms from the chart

1. Open the patient's chart, then Patient Communications > Forms.

2. To send questionnaires, use Assign Forms: move them from Available to Selected, set the Due Date (a week from today by default), and click Assign. Choosing Patient Intake sends every intake section.

3. To send only some intake sections, use Assign Intake: move the sections to Selected, set a Due Date, and click Assign Intake. The sections appear to the patient in alphabetical order.

Assigned Forms lists what the patient still has to do, grouped by visit or due date, with their progress once they start. History lists what they completed or what expired.

• To remove a questionnaire, click × next to it. This removes every assignment of that questionnaire for the patient, including ones sent for a visit.

• A patient can have one intake assigned outside a visit at a time.

• The message "Patient has been notified" appears after assigning, but the patient gets a text or email only when Form Assignment Notifications is on.

Send forms before each visit

1. In Notifications Admin, open the Pre-Visit Forms tab.

2. Under Where should intake histories be filed?, choose Into the scheduled visit's note or Into a separate timeline note. For a separate note, choose its Note type for the separate note (Chart Review by default).

3. For each visit type:

   • Under Intake sections, move the sections to Selected (in order) and use ▲ ▼ to set the order the patient sees them.

   • Under Questionnaires, do the same. Questionnaires come after the intake sections.

   • Under Consents, choose consents to send. See Consents.

   • Set Lead Time (days): how many days before the appointment the forms are sent, from 1 to 30 (7 by default).

4. Click Save.

When a patient has a booked appointment of that visit type within the lead time, the plugin assigns its forms, due on the appointment date. This happens when the appointment is booked or changed, and every 5 minutes for upcoming appointments.

• Each appointment gets its forms once. Changes to a visit type's forms apply to appointments that haven't been processed yet.

• A form you remove from a patient's visit is not sent again for that visit.

• Forms for a visit stay on the patient's list until the end of the visit day, then show as Expired, including when the appointment is canceled or rescheduled.

Text and email the patient

Two cards on the Campaigns tab tell patients they have forms. Both are off by default.

Form Assignment Notifications sends one text or email each time staff assign forms from the chart.

The default templates leave out {{forms_link}}; add it so patients can go straight to their forms. The menu also lists {{date_assigned}} and {{assigning_provider}}; in this version they show blank and "Provider", so leave them out.

Pre-Visit Forms Notifications sends one text or email per appointment when its pre-visit forms are assigned: at booking when the visit is already within the lead time, otherwise when the lead time starts. It goes out only for booked appointments.

Appointment Reminders can also remind patients about unfinished forms with {{form_reminder}}. See Appointment Notifications.

What the patient sees

1. The patient opens Forms from the portal menu, or the link in a text or email. If they aren't signed in, the portal asks them to sign in first.

2. My Forms lists consents to sign first, then a card for each set of forms, such as "Forms for your Follow-up on March 05, 2026". Forms not tied to a visit are grouped by due date.

3. The patient clicks Start form (or Continue, showing how far they got). One guided form takes them through the intake sections, then the questionnaires, with Back and Next.

4. Required questions are marked with an asterisk, and Next stays off until they're answered.

5. Answers save as the patient goes, so they can leave and come back. When they return, the form opens at the first page with their answers filled in.

6. The patient clicks Submit and sees Thank you!. The forms move to History on the My Forms page.

After submitting, the patient cannot open or change their answers. The portal home page shows a banner for consents waiting to be signed, and not for questionnaires or intake.

Required questions. In intake, the patient's legal name, date of birth, sex at birth, preferred language, address, mobile phone, email, contact preference, and emergency contact name and phone are required. In other questionnaires, text and single-choice questions are required unless the question text includes "(optional)"; checkbox questions are never required.

Where answers go

Troubleshooting