Creating a SmartForm Questionnaire

Creating Your First SmartForm Questionnaire

When creating a new SmartForm Questionnaire, you can start with a completely blank template and add Sections as needed, or you can start with one of our pre-created Questionnaire Templates.

1. Go to the SmartForms page using the Main Navigation Menu. If this is your first time there, you will find that there are no SmartForms in your account yet.  You will create your first one now.
2. Click on the +New button in the Top Toolbar.  This will bring up the Create New Questionnaire dialog box, where you can either select a starting Questionnaire Template, or instead you can start from scratch with a Blank Template.  If you decide to choose one of the provided Questionnaire Templates, your SmartForm Questionnaire will start off with a number of pre-loaded sections and questions.  If instead you choose a Blank Template, you will still have access to all the questions and sections, but you will need to add them into the questionnaire yourself.  For now, select the SmartND Adult Intake Template, and click on the Create button.  This will take you to the SmartForm Builder page.
   

   

   SmartForm Configuration Options

3. On the SmartForm Builder page, you have a few configuration options available:
   • Form Name: You can change the name of the form here.  Call it something like “Adult Intake Form”, or something similar.
   • Form Description:  Enter a simple form description here that will be visible to your patients when they see this form.  Make it something direct and simple.
   • Form Instructions:  Enter some basic instructions for your patient here, to help them understand what you expect from them in terms of filling out this form.  Something like “Please fill out all sections of this form as completely as possible” would be a nice and simple instruction.
   • Allow Patient To Submit Multiple Times:  This setting sets the default for whether or not this form can be submitted by patients multiple times.  A good example of this kind of form would be a diet journal.  You could allow your patients to fill out a diet journal and submit it every day or every week.  In this case, we are creating an Adult Intake Form, so a single submission will suffice.  Mark this as ‘no’.
   • Use As Medical Charting Template:  Set this option as ‘no’ for now.  This feature is not yet available.
   • Allow Other Practitioners To Have Access To This Form:  This option allows other practitioners to use this form for their patients as well.  You are essentially sharing this form with them, but you remain the author of the form, which means that only you can edit the form.  All others can do is simply administer it to their patients.  There are some additional options if you choose to share this form:
     • Select Practitioners / Select Offices: This field allows you to specify which practitioners and which offices or clinics can use this form for their patients.
     • See All Submissions:  This option allows you to see all the submissions of this form, even from patients of other practitioners who have used this form.  This is useful if you are conducting a multi-clinic study and want all the submissions to go to one place.
     • Allow Other Practitioners To See All Submissions: This option allows the practitioners that you have shared this form with to also be able to see all submissions if this form, regardless of which practitioner’s patients submitted them.  this is useful if you are doing a multi-clinic study and all practitioners want to be able to see all the patient submissions.
4. Now that your SmartForm Questionnaire is configured, you can take a look at the preloaded questions, load in additional sections, and configure the content of your Questionnaire.

Customizing Your SmartForm Questionnaire

If you have followed along so far, you will have a SmartForm Questionnaire with a number of sections and questions that were pre-loaded because you chose one of the provided Questionnaire Templates.  If instead you chose to use the Blank Template, then you will need to add in your sections manually.

Either way, the procedure for adding additional sections is the same.  In the Top Toolbar, there is a drop-down list called Select A Section.  In this list are all the possible SmartForm Sections that have not yet been added to your Questionnaire.  When you click on the list and then select a section, this section will be added to the end of your Questionnaire.

Select a section from the Sections drop down list to add that section to your chart. Each section comes pre-loaded with dozens of questions.

Once you are satisfied with the Sections that are loaded into Questionnaire, you can then start customizing the questions that are loaded into each section.  Your customization involves choosing which questions to show and which ones to hide.  Hidden questions will not show up in a patient’s Questionnaire.  Look for the checkboxes marked show located to the left of every question and event section.  If you want to simply remove an entire section, click on the red icon at the top right of each section.

Hide questions that you do not want to ask your patients on your form.

Adding A Consent Section

A Consent Section is essentially just another section of your Questionnaire, and is added in the same way as any other Section.  The SmartForms system has one Consent Section called a Consent Form With Signature, and then several other Consent Sections which do not have a signature box.  The purpose of each consent section is to provide the patient with the option to mark that they have agreed to that specific consent text.  Typically, you will save the Consent Form With Signature Section to be added as the last section in your form, so that the patient only needs to sign once to acknowledge the entire form.

Consent with signature section

Changing The Order Of SmartForm Sections

If you want to change the order of SmartForm sections, look for the Section Order field in the grey Section Configuration Bar to the left of every section.  This field shows the order in which the sections will be displayed.  To change the order of the sections in your Questionnaire, simply change the numbers in the Section Order field of every section in your Questionnaire to match the new order you want to have.  Then save the questionnaire and reload the page.

You can change the order of the sections in your SmartForm by changing the order number in the section configuration.