Filling out dental medical forms is one of those mundane tasks that no patient looks forward to. When these forms are overly complicated, long, or tedious, patients can form a negative impression of your dental practice before their exam or treatment even begins. 

Have you ever considered how your intake forms are impacting your patient experience? By creating user-friendly, stress-free dental medical forms that patients can fill out online, you can enhance patients' experiences before they even walk through the door.

1. Minimize the Number of Questions 

Of course, you need to know a patient's medical history and concerns so that you can provide personalized and comprehensive dental treatments. But patients can easily become overwhelmed filling out pages upon pages of forms before their appointments. 

Your first step in creating a more user-friendly dental medical form process is to take out any questions that aren't absolutely necessary. Consider which questions you could move to another part of their dental treatment process, such as once you've called them back for an exam or after you complete x-rays.

If you can't remove any questions, at least think about how you can remove unnecessary language from the forms. For example, instead of spelling out each question, like "Have you ever had a stroke?" and "Do you have diabetes?" you can list each condition as a bullet point and ask the patient to put a checkmark next to the conditions that have impacted them in the past or present. 

2. Group Similar Sections Together

To make your dental medical forms more intuitive, restructure them so that like items are always together. This way, your patients won't have to jump from topic to topic and lose their trains of thought. 

For example, you can group all of the questions about inflammatory risk factors together, including:

• Heart attack
• Stroke
• Osteoporosis
• Diabetes
• Hypertension
• Smoking
• Gastrointestinal disease

Creating clear labels for each section can help guide patients through their forms. They'll know how many sections they have left to complete and can anticipate the amount of time necessary to finish their medical history forms. 

3. Allow Patients to Complete Forms at Home

Some patients may prefer to fill out their dental medical forms at home, where they can go at their own pace, and look up answers to questions about medication or health history. You can send patients digital forms to complete before their appointments.

Not only do digital forms allow patients to complete them on their own time, but they also save your office time and help you stay on schedule for appointments. New patients won't need to spend 15 to 20 minutes filling out forms in the waiting room; they'll be able to head back to their exam as soon as the doctor is ready. 

4. Offer Digital and Paper Forms in Office

For patients who don't fill out their forms prior to their appointments, you should offer two types of forms: digital and paper. You could send the digital forms to the patients' emails for them to complete on a smartphone or let them fill out the forms on an in-office kiosk. Meanwhile, patients who prefer paper forms will still have this option as well. 

Make sure your digital forms are as intuitive and streamlined as possible. There's nothing worse than trying to click through a laggy, slow, glitching medical form, only to find that the page refreshed and deleted all the information you had previously entered. If your practice encounters this problem, switch to paper forms while you troubleshoot. 

5. Use an Easy-to-Navigate Patient Portal

Patients want to be informed about their medical treatment plans and how your practice is using the medical history you've provided them. By implementing a user-friendly patient portal, you can give patients full control over their medical records and provide an easy solution for filling out forms. 

With the Patient Portal by Dental Intelligence, you can empower patients to submit forms, view which forms they still need to complete, update their information at any time, and review their medical records from an app or website link. Your practice's online forms will be very user-friendly and intuitive, including easy-to-read fonts and smooth navigation to provide the best experience for patients.

Improving Patient Care with Easy-to-use Digital Forms and Tools

Dental medical forms are essential for accurate dental recordkeeping and providing top-quality care. But your medical form process doesn't need to be mind-numbing for patients. Schedule your Dental Intelligence demo to learn how our Patient Portal and digital forms can improve the patient experience.