In most cases, you will need your patient / client to sign a submitted SmartForm.  First off, make sure that your local laws recognize digital signatures as valid.  Regardless, I would advice in all cases that you make a note in your medical chart that you specifically asked the patient if they filled out the form, and that they confirmed they did so.

Adding a signature field to your SmartForm questionnaire

It’s quite simple to add a signature field to your SmartForm.  When you are initially creating the SmartForm, simply add a section called “Consent With Signature” from the sections menu at the top of the screen.  This will add a consent area where you and type in what you want the patient / client to consent to, and directly below this will be a digital signature pad.

If you have already created for your and have had a few patients already start filling them out, you can no longer edit that form.  You need to create a new version of the form, and start sending out this new version to your clients.  See the article on how to edit your SmartForm to learn more about this.

Select the ‘consent with signature’ section to add.

There are other types of consent sections that you can add (as illustrated above) however these other options do not have a signature pad attached.  The idea here is that you can add a number of different consent sections if needed (e.g. consent to treatment, consent to record sharing, consent to clinic fees, etc) but only have one consent section at the end with a signature, so that they only need to sign once.

When you add a consent section, you can enter in your own text that you want your client to consent to.

Configure your consent section.

Once you have configured your consent and sent it to the patient, they can then sign at the bottom in the signature pad.  They can sign using their mouse, their finger, or their stylus, depending on what type of device they are using to access the form.

If you have a tablet with a stylus at your clinic, then you can also have the patient simply sign the consent form when they are at the clinic.  To do this. see the article on how to send the SmartForm to your patient, which describes how you can have these forms filled out in the clinic.

A signed consent form.