When you publish a Finger-Ink Form, you choose where it should be published. If you'd like to send your Forms to patients so that they fill them out before their appointment, you'll first want to ensure that your Forms are published to the web.

To publish your Form to the web, visit the Forms page and click on a Form. Then, click the publish menu in the top right-hand corner of the screen, and make sure the "Publish to the web" switch is green. If it's not, toggle it so it is green, then publish your Form and come back to this menu after it's finished publishing.

Right click the text under the heading "Public link for your patients" and copy it. That's the public Form URL for this form. Every Form you publish has a unique URL.

Publishing to the web gives you a public Form URL. It's this URL that you can share with your patients so that they can actually fill out the Form.

Cliniko has the ability to send out an email when a patient books an appointment. They have an article on how they work, and how you can customise them here.

All you need to do to start collecting Form Responses before the patient comes in, is to add the relevant public Form URLs to the relevant appointment conformation email templates, like this:

The Cliniko template editor mostly works as you'd expect — but there's something that's tripped up a few people on during this step, and that's the link.

You see, when you first paste in a public Form URL, it will look something like the above — a long URL with "https://" at the front, some slashes and a short-codes. The Cliniko editor will detect that this is a URL, and automatically convert it into a clickable link. This is great, until you want to copy and paste this text into another appointment confirmation email template, then change the public Form URL.

If you're not careful, you could change the text of the link, instead of changing both the text and the public Form URL for the link. Here's a short video showing the issue:

In this video, I change copy and paste the template text to a new template. I then change the text of the public Form URL to another form. Finally, when I click on the link button while my cursor is within that text, I show that the URL is still pointing to the old public Form URL. Don't get caught out!

Another place to add the public Form URL is in the appropriate Appointment Reminder SMS. This serves as a final reminder to the patient that they need to fill out their "paperwork" before coming in.