Custom Intake Workflows

Tailoring SmartDocHealth to Your Specialty Practice Needs.

Every specialty practice has its own rhythm, clinical priorities, and information needs. A one-size-fits-all intake form may be simple to deploy, but it rarely captures the depth, nuance, and specialty-specific data required to deliver high-quality, efficient care. That’s where SmartDocHealth’s custom intake workflows come in.

Built into the Healthcare Practice Module, SmartDocHealth enables practices to design, deploy, and continuously refine specialty-specific intake experiences that align with real-world workflows—from dermatology photo documentation to cardiology risk assessments and beyond. The result is a smarter front door to care: every patient encounter begins with the correct information, in the proper format, at the right time.

Why Custom Intake Matters for Specialty Practices

For specialty practices, the intake process is not just about demographics and insurance. It’s a critical clinical tool that:

• Improves diagnostic accuracy by ensuring key specialty-specific questions are never missed.

• Reduces visit time by gathering structured, clinically relevant data before the patient enters the exam room—physically or virtually.

• Supports better triage by helping staff quickly identify the urgency of each patient and match them to the appropriate visit type or provider.

• Enhances patient experience with intuitive, guided forms and multimedia input options that feel modern and personalized.

• Feeds downstream AI workflows, enabling SmartDocHealth to generate more accurate summaries, risk flags, and decision support.

Because SmartDocHealth is used across diverse healthcare environments in the US, Mexico, and Spain, flexibility is built into the core platform. Intake workflows can be tailored to local regulations, languages, and practice norms—without sacrificing standardization where it matters.

How SmartDocHealth Custom Intake Workflows Work

SmartDocHealth gives practices a configurable intake engine that can be adapted to any specialty in a few key ways:

• Dynamic Question Logic: Questions appear or hide based on patient responses, visit reason, or risk profile.

• Multimedia Support: Patients and clinicians can attach photos, videos, and voice notes as part of the intake process.

• Specialty-Specific Templates: Starting points for typical specialties that can be cloned and customized.

• AI-Assisted Suggestions: The AI assistant can propose additional questions or forms based on the chief complaint or referral diagnosis.

• Localization: Forms can be configured in multiple languages (e.g., English and Spanish), aligned with regional practice requirements.

Intake workflows can run on patients’ smartphones before the visit, in kiosks at the clinic, or as part of virtual pre-visit flows for telehealth encounters.

Dermatology: Streamlined Photo-Driven Intake

Dermatology practices rely heavily on visual data. SmartDocHealth makes it easy to incorporate structured photo documentation directly into the intake process, turning the patient’s first interaction into a rich source of diagnostic information.

Dermatology Intake Workflow Example

• Step 1 – Reason for Visit: Patients select options such as “new rash,” “changing mole,” “acne follow-up,” or “psoriasis flare.”

• Step 2 – Guided Photo Capture: The intake form prompts patients to upload photos of the area of concern with clear instructions (e.g., “take one close-up, one from 30 cm away, and one showing the surrounding skin”).

• Step 3 – Symptom-Specific Questions: Dynamic questions adjust based on the type of complaint, such as itching, bleeding, duration, prior treatments, and a family history of skin cancer.

• Step 4 – Risk & History: Questions about sun exposure, tanning bed use, previous biopsies, immunosuppression, or personal/family history of melanoma.

• Step 5 – Medication & Allergy Capture: Focused on topicals, biologics, and known sensitivities to common dermatologic agents.

The AI engine synthesizes the patient’s responses and images into a pre-visit summary, flagging potential high-risk lesions or conditions for prioritization. For practices operating across different regions, the same core workflow can be localized by adjusting the language, examples, and risk factors to account for local sunlight exposure patterns or population characteristics.

Cardiology: Comprehensive Risk Assessment from the Start

Cardiology visits hinge on understanding a patient’s cardiovascular risk and symptom profile. SmartDocHealth enables structured, evidence-based risk assessments to be embedded directly into the intake process.

Cardiology Intake Workflow Example

• Step 1 – Visit Type & Referral Reason: New consultation, chest pain evaluation, hypertension management, heart failure follow-up, or pre-op assessment.

• Step 2 – Risk Factor Capture: Age, sex, smoking status, diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and family history of premature cardiovascular disease.

• Step 3 – Symptom Characterization: Guided questions about chest pain quality, duration, triggers, associated symptoms (dyspnea, palpitations, syncope), and functional capacity (e.g., number of flights of stairs tolerated).

• Step 4 – Vital & Wearable Data Integration: If the practice utilizes the Fitness Module, resting heart rate, activity levels, sleep patterns, and historical heart rate trends can be integrated into the intake summary.

• Step 5 – Medication & Comorbidity Review: Focused on anti-hypertensives, anti-platelets, statins, anticoagulants, and coexisting conditions such as CKD or COPD.

SmartDocHealth’s AI can calculate preliminary risk scores (e.g., atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk estimation using locally appropriate guidelines), flag concerning symptom constellations, and propose visit-level priorities. For example, a patient reporting exertional chest pain with multiple risk factors can be surfaced as a high-priority slot, while stable hypertension follow-ups may be triaged differently.

Behavioral Health: Sensitive, Staged Questionnaires

In behavioral health, intake must strike a balance between clinical completeness and sensitivity. SmartDocHealth supports staged, trauma-informed intake workflows that can be completed over time rather than in a single, overwhelming form.

Behavioral Health Intake Workflow Example

• Phase 1 – Core Demographics & Presenting Concern: Brief free-text or structured options about why the patient is seeking help.

• Phase 2 – Standardized Screening Tools: PHQ-9, GAD-7, or regional equivalents delivered in sequence, with logic that introduces additional tools based on scores (e.g., PTSD screening).

• Phase 3 – Safety & Crisis Questions: Suicide risk and self-harm questions presented with supportive language and immediate escalation rules for affirmative responses.

• Phase 4 – Social Determinants of Health: Housing, employment, social support, and access to transportation, with optional linkage to community resources depending on region.

These workflows can be configured to allow patients to pause and resume, while SmartDocHealth’s AI summarizes scores and flags urgent risks for the clinician ahead of the visit.

Primary Care & Multispecialty Clinics: Modular Intake by Visit Type

For primary care and multispecialty settings, intake needs vary significantly. SmartDocHealth enables modular workflows that adapt based on the reason for visit:

• Preventive Visits: Age- and sex-specific preventive screenings, vaccinations, lifestyle questions, and health maintenance reminders.

• Chronic Disease Follow-Up: Focused questionnaires for diabetes, hypertension, COPD, or asthma, linked to recent lab values and home monitoring data.

• Acute Concerns: Symptom-specific flows for respiratory infections, musculoskeletal pain, GI complaints, or urinary symptoms.

Each module can be toggled on/off by the practice or configured differently at each location. This is especially useful for organizations operating across the US, Mexico, and Spain, where regulatory requirements and standard care pathways can differ by country or region.

Adapting to Diverse Healthcare Environments

SmartDocHealth’s intake workflows are designed to be both standardizable and adaptable, which is crucial when supporting practices in multiple countries and care settings.

Localization & Compliance

• Language Support: Intake forms can be easily configured in English and Spanish, with regionally appropriate terminology.

• Regulatory Alignment: Consent, privacy disclosures, and mandatory screening elements can be tailored to national and regional regulations.

• Configurable Required Fields: Practices can define which data elements are mandatory for specific visit types or specialties.

Workflow Flexibility

• Multiple Entry Points: Patients can complete intake via mobile app, browser-based portal, QR codes in waiting rooms, or receptionist-assisted kiosks.

• Telehealth Integration: For virtual visits, pre-visit intake is automatically triggered when appointments are scheduled, with reminders managed by the AI assistant.

• Multi-Location Support: Templates can be shared across locations while allowing site-level modifications.

AI as a Co-Designer of Intake

Beyond static forms, SmartDocHealth’s AI virtual assistant helps refine and personalize intake at both the patient and practice level.

• Per-Patient Personalization: Based on prior visits, diagnoses, and wearable data, the assistant can selectively surface or skip questions.

• Practice-Level Optimization: The system analyzes completion rates, time-to-complete, and clinical usefulness of each question, suggesting improvements over time.

• Dynamic Branching: If a patient raises a new concern during the intake, the assistant can branch into additional, specialty-appropriate question sets.

This continuous learning loop means your intake workflows don’t just reflect how your practice worked last year—they evolve with your team, your patient population, and emerging best practices.

Real-World Benefits Across Specialties

• For Dermatologists: Fewer missed details, richer visual history, and more time for in-visit counseling and procedures.

• For Cardiologists: Better upfront risk stratification, more focused in-person evaluations, and safer triage of high-risk presentation.

• For Behavioral Health Providers: More complete and sensitive histories gathered at the patient’s pace, with automated risk flagging.

• For Multispecialty Networks: Standardized core data plus specialty modules, improving care coordination without forcing uniformity where it doesn’t fit.

Your Specialty, Your Workflow, Your Way

SmartDocHealth’s custom intake workflows are designed to meet practices where they are—whether you’re a single-location dermatology clinic, a cardiology group embedded in a hospital system, or a multisite network serving patients across the US, Mexico, and Spain.

By tailoring intake to your specialty needs, you’re not only making forms more convenient but also ensuring a more effective process. You’re:

• Improving clinical decision-making with richer, more relevant data.

• Reducing friction at every step of the patient journey.

• Unlocking the full power of SmartDocHealth’s AI-assisted workflows and analytics.

In a healthcare landscape that demands both personalization and efficiency, SmartDocHealth gives specialty practices the tools to design intake workflows that truly reflect how they deliver care.

Interested in seeing how custom intake workflows could look for your specialty? Schedule a SmartDocHealth demo, and we’ll walk you through real examples tailored to your practice type and region.