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 (1) 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.

Publishing to the web gives you a couple of specific URLs with which to access this form on the web. These are:

The identity-verified form URL is specifically for copying and pasting into your Cliniko appointment confirmation/reminder templates — because Cliniko will swap the {{Patient.IdentificationNumber}} part for the actual patient ID. Doing this starts our identity-verification workflow, where the patient is asked to provide their email address so we can send them a special code which they can then use to prove their identity.

Once they've provided their identity, we can pre-fill the web form with all their information from the patient record, and ensure we match to the exact right patient. They can also close the form after partial-filling, and pick up where they left off at a later time. And — you'll be able to see who's started their form, and how far through they are.

All to say: this is now the preferred way to send forms to your patients before they arrive.

The public form URL is the old way of filling out forms. It's a generic link that can be used for all patients. When someone fills out a form using this link, we have to them determine to which patient record the form should go. This isn't always 100% (e.g. when family members use the same email address), which is why using the identity-verified form URL is now our preferred method of filling forms on the web.

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 identity-verified form URLs to the relevant appointment confirmation/reminder templates.

For example, let's say I just published my form with the public URL of https://forms.finger-ink.com/finger-ink/example-intake.

First, I'd copy the identity-verified form URL from the form editor (which ends up being https://forms.finger-ink.com/finger-ink/example-intake/p/{{Patient.IdentificationNumber}}), and paste it into the appropriate confirmation template in Cliniko — but there's an important extra step!

This is what your template might look like after pasting in the URL. At first glance, it looks fine:

When you paste in any URL into Cliniko's template editor, it automatically converts this URL into a clickable link. In this case we do not want this to happen. So it needs to be removed.

To do this, first click somewhere in the red highlighted link text (1), then click the highlighted chain icon (2) to bring up the insert link box:

Once the dialog is visible, click the remove link button,

That will close the box and bring you back to the template editor. When the colour and underline have been removed from the URL in the editor, you know it's worked:

The last step is to save your changes with the update button, and you're all set:

You can use this same workflow to add form links to any other confirmation or reminder template — email or SMS it makes no difference!