If you need to get information from your patients before their appointments, patient forms should be able to help! Within your Cliniko account, you can create unique form templates, and you can include a link to the forms in your appointment confirmations and reminder emails. Patients can then fill the form out and securely submit it back to you—all online. This might be particularly handy if you're offering telehealth appointments, or need to screen patients prior to seeing them.

We'll walk you through the following:

If you'd like to watch a video overview of how forms work, we'll walk you through it below!

Read on for instructions on how to get started with secure patient forms! 🎉

Before you can send forms to patients, you'll have to have templates. These are similar in appearance to treatment note templates, but the difference is that it's going to be the patient filling them out, not the practitioner.

To get started with the form templates, head to Settings, and then Patient form templates:

You'll see two options here. You can either Add template where you'll create one from scratch or you can Import an existing image or PDF file you have:

If you hit Add template, you can start setting up your template:

You'll want to give your template a name, and add sections and questions:

Once that's done, be sure to hit the Save template button:

You'll then see a copy of the form—but this is just a copy, to help you see what it looks like: 

If you have your own image or PDF form template, you can upload this directly. Additionally, if you have a friend or colleague that has created form templates in their own Cliniko account, they can also share their template with you to add to yours!

Hit Import from the main form template screen. You'll then be able to give your template a name, and upload the file:

Once you've chosen the file, it will automatically be uploaded. You can then hit Import template and Cliniko will process it:

Once the file has been successfully uploaded to Cliniko, it's ready to be used as your form template. You can check it and make any changes if needed:

You can check out our full guide on uploading your own form templates where we go into more detail about this feature.

Next, we'll show you how to share this form with your patients!

In order to get this form to your patients, you're going to need to include a link in your confirmation email templates or appointment reminder templates (or both, if you want).

The process is pretty much the same for both. We'll walk you through how to add the form to a confirmation email template. You can repeat the process for reminder email templates if you wish.

Head to Settings, and then Appointment confirmations:

On the next page, select the applicable template (or create a new one, if you want):

Within the template, you'll see a new placeholder menu called PATIENT FORM:

If you select this, a drop-down menu will appear with all available forms:

Select the one you want, and wherever your cursor is located within the template, it will automatically drop it into your confirmation template as a placeholder:

The placeholder means that Cliniko "knows" which form to send along with this particular appointment confirmation—so you don't need to manually copy and paste any links!

After you add the placeholder feel free to add any text around the placeholder to add context for your patients. For example, we've added a "Forms" heading and the text "Please fill out the following form and submit before your appointment" before the placeholder:

If you want to get a rough idea of what your patient will see in the email, you can select the View sample button. This will share a preview of the email with you (note that the email will appear differently for patients depending on what type of email application they use, but the general idea is the same):

When you're all finished, save that template! Now, the form will be automatically emailed to patients in their appointment confirmation email.

When your patient gets the email with the form, all they'll need to do is click the link, which will open it on the device they're using. Once the form is opened, they'll see something like this:

They'll fill out the requested fields, and hit the Submit button at the bottom:

Once it's submitted, they'll see a "thank you" screen like this:

That's all done! 🙌 The patient has now completed and securely submitted the form back to your clinic.

Once the form is submitted, it can be found in a few places. 

There will be a link to the form on the related appointment, under "Forms":

You can also find a link to the form in the patient's details page:

All forms for the patient will be listed on the Forms page:

And finally, when you view the form, you'll see something like this:

Patient forms are a secure and paper-free way of obtaining the important information you might need before an appointment! If you have any questions, our support team can certainly help out!