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OutSmart Guide

Asking Patients For Their Details In A Smart Form

A SmartForms V2 form can ask a patient for their own details: their name, date of birth, address, phone numbers, email, health card, family doctor and an emergency contact. These questions come from Patient details in the Templates category of the form editor’s toolbox.

When the patient submits the form, nothing is written to their file. Their answers wait in the patient’s workspace until someone on your team reviews them and chooses what to copy. Every detail that is copied is recorded in Change history, with who entered it and who copied it.

Adding the Patient details section to a form

The toolbox is the column of icons down the left side of the form editor. On most screens it shows only small icons, so open it out first to see its categories.

  1. Open the form in the form editor. See Creating A Smart Form if you are starting a new one.
  2. Click the magnifying glass at the top of the toolbox. The toolbox opens out and lists its categories, such as Choice Questions, Misc and Templates.
  3. Click Templates to open that category.
  4. Click Patient details, or drag it onto the form. The toolbox closes again.

The whole section is added in one step, laid out in seven groups:

GroupQuestions
Your nameFirst name, middle name, last name, preferred name, pronoun, gender, date of birth
Where you liveAddress, apartment or unit, city, province or state, country, postal or ZIP code
How to reach youMobile, home and work phone (with “This is the best number to reach me” and “You can send me text messages” where they apply), fax, email, best way to reach you
About youOccupation, employer, nationality, country you mainly live in, marital status, number of children, languages, how they heard about you
Health cardHealth card number, and the country and province or state that issued it
Family doctorThe patient’s family doctor, with their name, clinic and phone if the patient knows them
Emergency contactName, their relationship to the patient, and phone number

The section sits on your form beside your own questions, so one form can collect both the patient’s details and your intake questions.

Adding single questions instead

If you only need a few details, such as an emergency contact on an otherwise clinical form, open the toolbox with the magnifying glass and click the Patient details fields category instead. It has one item for each question in the section. Click an item, or drag it to where you want it on the form. Each one can go anywhere on the form, in any order, and each can appear once per form. If you add a question the form already has, the editor removes the new copy and tells you which details were not added a second time.

What you can and cannot change

Each Patient details question tells OutSmart which part of the patient’s file its answer belongs to, so the wording of these questions cannot be changed. Click one of them and its toolbar shows only two buttons:

  • Required makes the patient answer it before they can submit.
  • Delete takes it off this form. You can add it back from Patient details fields at any time.

You can also change whether a question is shown and how wide it is. Everything else about these questions is fixed, and the form will not save if a Patient details question has been renamed or appears twice.

Sending the form

A form with Patient details questions is sent exactly like any other SmartForms V2 form: by email, on a tablet in the clinic, with a guest link, or automatically with an event type. See Sending Smart Forms To Patients.

To ask a patient to check their details without sending a form, use Client Update from their workspace instead. Client Update is not tied to one practitioner’s form, so anyone on your team who can edit the patient’s details can start it.

What the patient sees

The Patient details questions always open empty. The form never shows the patient what is already on file. The patient fills in what they want to share. The province list shows only the provinces or states of the country they choose.

A question the patient leaves empty is never offered as a change, so a blank answer cannot clear a detail you already hold.

Reviewing what the patient entered

When the patient submits, their answers are kept with the patient’s record and are not copied anywhere yet. The next time a practitioner or admin who can edit that patient opens the patient’s workspace, a window titled New details from the patient opens by itself.

The window lists each detail in the groups of the form, with what is On file now beside what The patient entered:

  • A detail that matches the file is greyed out and marked Same, with no checkbox.
  • A detail that differs from the file is already checked off for you, ready to copy.
  • First name, middle name, last name and date of birth are never checked for you, even when they differ. Check them yourself if you want to copy them. A wrong copy of a name or date of birth makes the patient look like someone else.
  • Emergency contact lines say Not kept on the file. Copying adds a workspace note.

Uncheck anything you do not want to copy, then choose one of the two buttons at the bottom:

ButtonWhat it does
Copy the ticked details (the blue button)Copies every detail that is checked off to the patient’s file, and to their Patient Portal details if they have a portal account. The patient card updates straight away.
Do not copy anythingCloses the review without changing the file.

The window can only be closed with one of those two buttons. If someone closes the page instead, the window opens again the next time the workspace is opened. When a patient has sent more than one set of details, the window says how many are waiting, and the next set opens after you choose.

A guest link can be opened by anyone, so a form submitted through one is matched to a patient by the name and date of birth entered on it. The review window for those forms shows a highlighted note asking you to check that it is the right person before you copy anything.

Change history

Every change to a patient’s details is recorded: what changed, what it was before and after, when, and who made it. To see it, open the patient’s workspace, click the three dots at the top right of the patient card (More actions), and choose Change history.

Each line says where the change came from, for example Entered by the patient through a SmartForm. Copied by followed by the name of the staff member who copied it. Changes your team makes with the card’s Edit button are listed too, as Edited by and the staff member’s name.

Who can review and copy

The review window opens for practitioners and admins who are allowed to edit that patient’s details. It is the same permission you need to edit the details yourself from the patient card. Staff without that permission do not see the window, and the answers wait for someone who has it.

Troubleshooting

The review window did not open

  • The patient has not submitted yet. Check the form’s status on the patient’s Smart Forms tab.
  • Someone has already reviewed it. A set of details is reviewed once. Look in Change history to see what was copied, and by whom.
  • The workspace was already open when the patient submitted. Reload the page.

A detail I expected is not offered

The patient left that question empty, or the detail they entered matches what is on file, in which case it is marked Same.