Patient Intake — One Link, Forms Done Before Session One

What this video covers

The narration of the video, chapter by chapter. Any draft shown is a starting point that the clinician reviews and edits before it is used.

Welcome

Most of a first session gets spent on questions your client could have answered at home — name, history, medications, what brought them in.

The Intake page moves all of that to before the appointment. You share a form, your client fills it in, and their answers come back ready to become the first draft of your report — with their consent signed and recorded.

Start from the full intake

My Clinical Writer gives you a complete adult psychological intake out of the box. Rather than building a form from nothing, duplicate this one and make it yours.

That gives you an editable copy — still a draft, so nothing goes out while you work on it.

Cut it down to what you need

Give the copy a name.

Then trim. Everything here has a delete button, so you can strip a long intake down to the handful of things you actually want answered before a first session.

Add your own questions

Add anything that's missing. Type the question, then pick the answer type — a short answer, a long answer, a date, an email, or multiple choice.

And if the order isn't right, nudge any question up or down until it flows the way you'd actually ask it.

Consent is built in

Underneath the questions are the consent blocks — this is where intake stops being just a form.

Your client reads exactly what they're agreeing to, and signs it by typing their name. My Clinical Writer records that signature together with the precise wording they saw, in a full consent trail.

Preview the patient view

Before you send anything, preview it. This is your form as your client will meet it — one question per screen, in order, with the required ones marked.

Publish it

New forms start as drafts, so nothing goes out by accident. Publish it, and a share button appears on the card.

Share one link

One link covers that whole form. Copy it, send it straight from your device, or share it by email or message.

Put it in your booking confirmation once and leave it there — everyone who opens it gets their own private copy of the form, so no two clients ever see each other's answers.

And if you need to switch it off, just unpublish the form — the link stops working straight away.

What your client sees

Here's the other side. Your client opens the link on any device — no account, no password, no app to download.

One question at a time, so a long intake never feels like a wall of text. And every answer saves as they go, so they can stop halfway, close the tab, and pick up exactly where they left off.

Consent and signature

At the end comes the consent block. Your client reads the wording, agrees, and signs by typing their name.

Then they see everything they've entered, one last time, before they submit it.

It lands in your dashboard

Back on your side, it's already here. The Submissions tab tracks every intake through its whole life — created, opened, in progress, and finally signed.

And because the form asks for their name, every submission arrives labelled with who it came from — you are never guessing which row belongs to which client.

Send it straight to Draft

And this is where the time actually comes back. One click on "Send to Draft".

Their answers land in Smart Draft as your text content, labelled question by question — with nothing retyped and nothing lost.

Turn it into a report

From here it's the ordinary Draft flow. Pick the template you write in — a SOAP note, or whatever structure your practice uses.

And if you have anything else from your client — a referral letter, previous notes, a scanned form — you can attach it here as well. We're keeping this one simple and using nothing but the intake.

Then generate.

And there it is — a structured note, drafted from what your client filled in at home, before they ever sat down in front of you.

Wrap up

That's Patient Intake — set the form up once, share one link, and start every first session with the history already written up and the consent already signed.