Patient intake: the form, and then the retyping
A clipboard at reception is not really a form problem. It is a copying problem: somebody types what was written into something else, and guesses at the handwriting.
Then the same person comes back in March and is handed the same blank sheet, because nothing remembers that they already answered it. And the allergy that was written in the margin is in a filing cabinet rather than anywhere it can be looked up.
What an intake list needs
- Something the patient fills in themselves, on their own phone before they arrive or on a tablet in the waiting room — so nobody transcribes anything.
- One list of patients where each answer is a field you can search, not a scan you have to open and read.
- The slices that matter: allergies, who is due a review, who has not filled anything in yet.
- A history, so a changed answer is a change you can see rather than an overwrite.
Where the answers would actually sit — read this part first
We are not a HIPAA-covered vendor and we do not sign business associate agreements. If you are a covered entity in the United States and your obligations require a BAA, the hosted service is the wrong choice and we would rather say so here than sell it to you and let you find out.
There is a desktop app, and it keeps each app’s database on your own computer, encrypted on disk, rather than on our servers. For some practices that is exactly the arrangement they want. Whether it satisfies the rules you work under is a question for whoever advises you on them — we are not going to pretend to answer it.
Whatever you decide, our privacy page lists every subprocessor that ever touches hosted data. It is a short list and we keep it short.
If it is the list you are missing, not the compliance
Plenty of the people who search for an intake form are not a hospital. They are a small physio, a dental practice, a counsellor, a clinic in a country with different rules, or somebody collecting health questions for a race or a summer camp. For them the thing that is actually missing is the list behind the form, and Bionic Forms is a small database with forms on the front rather than a form builder:
- A public page at
/f/your-formanyone can fill in with no account, rendered on the server so it works with JavaScript off and on a bad connection, with a QR code for the waiting-room card. - An anonymous mode that stores no IP address anywhere — not on the record, not in the logs, and not in the rate limiter, which hashes instead.
- Every answer becomes a field in a list you can filter, group and sort.
- Every change kept, so an amended answer is visible rather than silent.
There is no one-click ready-made intake app today; the ones that exist are on ready-made apps. You can open the live demo database with no account and no email, or describe what you need in a sentence and have it built from that.
Try it without signing up. Open the live demo — no account, no email, and no patient data.
The free plan has no card and no trial clock. See pricing, and what happens to your data.
If you would rather not build it yourself: tell us what you need and we will build a working version and show you. No fee and no card. That offer stands for the list; it does not change anything in the box above, and if what you describe needs a BAA we will tell you so rather than build it.
This URL used to hold a form template from the old Bionic Forms, which was a form builder and was retired on 11 July 2026. The page you are reading replaced it because the question people arrive with still has an answer here — including, for some of them, the answer that we are not the right tool.