All Collections
Forms
Sending your intake form to new patients before their arrival
Sending your intake form to new patients before their arrival

Increase your pre-arrival form submission rate by texting and/or email your form to new patients ahead of their appointment

Monique Clark avatar
Written by Monique Clark
Updated over a week ago

Just got your new Patient Intake Form and want to make sure all your new patients receive it via SMS or email ahead of their appointment?

There are two ways to target new patients and it depends on how your Cliniko account is set up.

If you want to target patients who book a specific new patient appointment type such as 'Initial appointment' then you can use the appointment types filter to target those appointments. However, you can also use the appointment count filter to target patients who have never had an appointment before. So this would send to any patient who is about to attend their first-ever appointment in your Cliniko. To do this you'd set the appointment count filter to 0 - meaning they have never attended an appointment before.

Send it via Email

We create a number of Transactional emails for you when your account is first set up. One of these is the First Appointment Preparation email. This email is sent 1 day before any appointment type which contains the word 'First' or 'Initial' or the appointment category is 'Initial'. You can edit the content of this email before we switch it on. We'll have already inserted a link to your form. But here are the instructions on editing this email.

  1. Log in to Peptalkr and go to the Send Email tab.

  2. Click on the Transactional tab.

  3. Scroll down and look for the email titled First Appointment Preparation - click on it.

  4. On the right hand side of the screen click View and Edit.

  5. Scroll down to Content then click Edit Content.

  6. From here you can change the text, add more buttons, change the images, add entire new sections (including videos) and more. When you are happy with your changes simply Preview to see how your email will look on both computers and on phones.

  7. Finally, click I'm done.

If you haven't communicated with us to approve your Transactional emails yet - make sure you do so we can turn them on for you.

Send it via SMS

  1. Log in to Peptalkr and go to the Send SMS tab.

  2. Press the Add New button.

  3. Give your SMS a logical name such as: Pre-Appointment New Patient Intake Form and press next.

  4. Select Automated Recurring and press next.

  5. Select No, this is an important message that should go to all patients whether they have opted into marketing or not and press next.

  6. Select Only some patients and press next.

  7. Under Appointment Type select all appointment types that should receive the new patient intake form (e.g all appointment types that contain the word 'First' or 'Initial') and press next.

  8. Select Before the patients next appointment and then select the number of days or hours before their appointment you'd like to send the intake form.

  9. Type in what you'd like the SMS to say. For example:

Hi [patientfirstname], 
ahead of your appointment 
tomorrow we'd appreciate 
if you could fill in this 
new patient form:
[insert your unique form URL]
Thank you

You can use the provided variables to insert the patient's name, appointment date & time and more. But in this example, we're keeping it simple and under 160 characters. We already send an appointment reminder with the details of the appointment via Cliniko's built in reminder system - so this SMS is purely about the intake form.

That's it! Press the next button and you'll be able to review your automated recurring SMS message. Once you switch it on, it will send to all new patients at the time you specified!

Note: You must have SMS credits in order to send SMS reminders. View your balance and purchase new credits at any time on the Send SMS tab.

Did this answer your question?