Have you ever thought filling out forms is a pain in the neck? TypeForm makes the experience of filling out forms fluid and fun. At the doctor’s office, filling out an intake form is often the first experience the patient has upon arriving for his or her appointment. If you have a medical practice, then you might be interested in improving your intake process. With TypeForm, in conjunction with Formstack Documents, you can merge the form submissions with a template document and automatically file them in your digital document storage system and/or as easily print them out as hard copies.
In the first step of this tutorial, we’ll create our Formstack Documents Template document. This can be as simple or as complex as you want. All you have to do is use merge fields in the places where you want the form responses to go. The following is an example document. Notice the merge fields using brackets and the dollar sign.
After you've logged in to your Formstack Documents acocount, you can upload this word document and be on your way to enhancing our form collection process with TypeForm. Assuming you already have a TypeForm account and have created the TypeForm to collect patient information, the next step is to use Zapier to Formstack Documents your document with your TypeForm.
At Zapier, you simply choose to connect TypeForm with Formstack Documents and follow their simple instructions. Let’s walk through some of the steps:
The first step is to choose your trigger and match it to an action. We choose the New Entry option through TypeForm and match it to the Create Document Merge option through Formstack Documents.
The second step is to login to your TypeForm account through Zapier and input your API Key. You can find your API key in the account settings of your TypeForm Account. We do the same thing in the third step but this time for Formstack Documents.
Once you have both your Formstack Documents and TypeForm accounts connected to Zapier, the next steps are to tell Zapier how the two should connect. In steps 4 and 5 select the TypeForm you want to use and the Formstack Documents document you want it to connect to. Before you start filling out the merge field connections in step 5, skip to step 6 and run a test of your TypeForm to make sure you have data submitted as this completes the connection to Zapier’s API integration. After you’ve run a test submission go back to step 5 and Zapier should show you all the form input fields available to connect to your Formstack Documents document.
The last step is to turn your Zap on by giving it a name! We can name this Zap: New Patient. Now when our TypeForm gets submitted the information will be sent to Formstack Documents and merged with your template and delivered according to your delivery options. Let’s take a step back and look at some of the delivery options available through Formstack Documents. Some Formstack Documents delivery options include, Dropbox, box, and Google Drive for storing documents in the cloud and Lob for sending documents off via regular mail.
If you use box, which is HIPAA compliant, to store your patient’s files, you can configure Formstack Documents to save files in a box folder when the form gets submitted. Let’s take a quick look at how to set up that configuration. Select box as your preferred delivery option and login granting Formstack Documents the ability to write files to your box account.
After you’ve connected Formstack Documents to box, set up you configuration so that form submissions go into the proper folder. To do this, go to advanced options and select that you want to use Merge field(s) as a subfolder name.
Select the Name Merge field. Also make sure your root folder is set to the proper root folder, for example, Patients.
Now whenever you have a patient come in and fill out the Patient Intake Form through TypeForm, upon submission, the form will be automatically uploaded to the folder for that patient.
As you can see, the template document we created in the first part of this tutorial is now populated with the information input by the patient.
If you are storing the document in some other digital file system and in hard copy form, you probably just want to have Formstack Documents send you an email with the document attached every time a patient submits the form. That way you can upload it to your own server and / or simply print it out. To do so, simply navigate to the delivery tab for the Formstack Documents document you created in the first step of this tutorial and specify email as the delivery option. In the email settings, input the email address you want Formstack Documents to send the form submissions to and you’re all set!
Now that you have your form connected to Formstack Documents, your patients will enjoy filling out those intake forms and you won’t have to worry about messy handwriting! You’ll also conveniently already have the form in PDF format so you can print it out and file it away and / or upload it to your private records server.
