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First, you'll create the Form Template in one of your category nodes.
Next, you'll prepare Form Sections for use in your Template. You can create your own by adding a new Form Section in the sidebar and adding Form Elements to it.
You'll also need to edit each Form Section's Narrative side, which contains a written summary of the results of the information entered into a patient form. We recommend editing the Narrative AFTER adding all desired Form Elements into a Form Section!
Once you've prepared your Form Sections, you can then add them to a Form Template.
We recommend generating a test form on a test patient account to ensure it looks how you'd like. Make sure your forms are ready and tested before using them in a live environment!
You're done!
Creating a Form Template
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To first create a Form Template, you'll select a Category node in the EMR/EDR Sidebar. These are the pinkfolders pink folders that can be added in the Form Category node.
Once selected, click the Green Plus to add a new form. This will bring up the Forms Palette, which is an essential tool you'll use throughout the forms creation process. You'll use the Forms Palette to customize the details of a Form, a Form Section, and when you have Patient Forms selected. We strongly recommend reading the Forms Palette article for a clear understanding of this tool.
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In the Forms Palette, you can set up details about the Form Section as displayed in the screenshot above. You can read more about the Forms Palette in this article here.
You'll use the Forms Palette to drag in Form Elements into the Form Section. There are several Form Elements at your disposal, which we strongly recommend you review in the Form Elements article.
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When you've added an Element, you can customize details about the Element in the Inspector area of the Forms Palette, shown in the image above. On the General Tab, you can typically edit the placement and size of the element by adjusting the X, Y, Width, and Height fields. You'll also want to set a clear name for this Element, which will help identify it when filling out the form, and when identifying it in the Narrative View.
You can also drag in Pull Fields, which are used to bring in information from several areas in the MacPractice database. You can drag Pull Fields into both the Form Section or the Narrative View.
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A Note About large Form Sections: When building a Form Section, avoid making lots of large Form Sections. It is very beneficial to use multiple small sections, rather than one large section for a given portion of the template, as this provides additional flexibility when arranging the template. This is most important when using pull fields and formatting the Narrative. Using smaller Form Sections will also provide you more exact control over what information pulls forward from previously filled out Patient Forms when generating new Patient Forms. |
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Formatting Advice: Templates built by MacPractice Template Specialists typically use Lucida Grande as the font. The size varies, but typically will be 10 pt for the body of the template. Additionally, on the narrative we generally use 12 pt bold and underlined for section titles, and 14 pt bold and underlined for the name of the form. If you want to adjust the default font type and size, you can do so in the MacPractice Menu > Preferences > EMR > General. |
Editing the Narrative
Once you have added all the Form Elements you'd like to see on your Form Section and you're comfortable with their layout and customization, let's take a look at the narrative. You can switch over to the Narrative View by pressing Command-\ (Backslash) on your keyboard, or you can switch to the narrative via the EMR/EDR Menu.
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This definitely lays out the Reason for Visit a bit clearer, but the checkbox isn't really working like we intend. Why is that? The reason has to do with how we have the Checkbox Element configured in the Forms Palette. Let's take a look :
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on the image to the right --->
In the Check Box Inspector, on the Options Tab, we can see some specific options available for the Checkbox Element. Here, we can see that the "Narrative Checked" field contains "First Visit?" which was the initial name of our checkbox element. Here, we can configure it to report a different text result depending on whether the checkbox is checked or not.
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If we change it to Yes and No respectively...
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Then the narrative on the patient form will appear as thus so if this checkbox is checked :
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This can obviously get more complicated as your Form Sections become more elaborate. This is why we strongly recommend that you keep your Form Sections small, so you can approach form template building from a modular perspective, building small pieces that you can combine. This also helps you format your narratives easily.
If you ever need to re-add a Form Element to the Narrative that you accidentally or intentionally removed, you can do so on the Forms Palette under Pull Fields. The Narrative View must be showing, and when it is, there is an additional category containing the Form Section's elements.
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Adding Pull Fields To a Form
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