Patient Intake
How the new patient question set is defined for a Kareo practice: varying it by appointment type, specialty, and chief complaint, deciding how deep to go on the phone, and knowing which questions belong to your clinicians instead.
A generic intake list returns generic answers, and clinical staff quickly learn to skip it and ask again. The question set is what determines whether the summary earns a place in the workflow, which makes configuring it the highest-leverage decision in the whole setup.
Most practices get more from varying questions by appointment type than by anything else. A new patient consult, a follow-up, and a procedure booking each need a different preparation, and asking all three the same list wastes the caller's patience on the two it does not fit.
Every additional question is a chance for the caller to disengage. Practices that start with the few items their clinicians genuinely use before the visit, then add, end up with more complete data than practices that start with the full paper form.
Anything that requires interpreting an answer to decide the next question belongs with a clinician. The design principle is to capture what the patient reports and flag complexity for review, rather than to conduct an assessment.
New patient demographics to Kareo
Name, DOB, phone populate patient record automatically
Structured intake summary for chart
Medical history, medications, allergies returned as pasteable text for staff review and filing
Insurance captured for staff verification
Details on the call, reviewed and filed by billing team per your workflow
Questionnaire responses logged
All intake Q&A timestamped and available for reference
Yes. Intake questions are configured by appointment type, specialty, or chief complaint, so the set asked on a new patient consult differs from the one asked when booking a procedure.
Your practice. It is configuration, and it is expected to change once your clinicians have read a few weeks of real summaries and seen which answers they use and which they ignore.
Long enough to cover what your clinicians will actually read before the visit. There is no fixed number, but the practical constraint is the caller's patience, and a set that regularly goes unfinished is a set that is too long.
The complexity is flagged in the summary as needing clinician review before the appointment, and what the patient reported is captured as they said it. Your team can call the patient back if more detail is needed.
Patients can be sent a link after the call to upload photo identification and insurance cards, which your team processes per your own verification workflow. Whether to request them is part of the same configuration decision.
Workflow
Patient intake
How structured intake is captured on the call and prepared for your chart.
Next step
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Related
New Patient Phone Intake on Kareo: Capture at Call Time, Not After
Most Kareo practices collect new-patient info offline—caller provides name, insurance gets verified later.
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Kareo call handling
How the receptionist works alongside Kareo.
See how MedReception AI handles after-hours calls, scheduling, intake, and patient communication for medical practices like yours.
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