How are forms set up for my clinic?

How are forms set up for my clinic?

Who this is for: clinic owners and admins. How staff build, send and review forms is in the provider guide, How do I build a form and assign it to a patient?.

What GRAICE turns on

These switches are set by GRAICE for every clinic, not from your Settings. Each one is turned on in its own step, after its checks are done, so your team may see them arrive one at a time. Contact support to ask where things stand. See How support works.

• Online forms: patients fill in and sign forms from their account, from an emailed link, or on a device your staff hand them in clinic, and staff fill in staff-only forms from the chart. While this is off, forms can be assigned and tracked but not sent or filled in, and the chart's Forms section says so.
• The form studio and the extra field types: document-style forms, tables, date and time, checkbox groups, print settings and a printable blank PDF.
• AI drafting: Describe it and Upload a paper form on New form. Turned on only after the clean-up of uploaded paper forms has been checked in production.
• File uploads on forms: a File Upload question patients can answer. Turned on only after the clean-up of unsubmitted files is running and watched.
• Form reminders: email reminders about unfinished forms (see below).

What your clinic controls

On each form, whoever builds it chooses:

• whether the patient signs, whether a signature certificate is made, and whether the signer may draw their signature;
• whether a clinician must countersign;
• whether it is staff-only;
• whether staff are notified when it is submitted, and on which days reminders are sent;
• whether a guardian or family member may complete it (off unless turned on for the form and again for each assignment).

Who can build and assign forms follows your team's roles. See Roles and permissions.

Form reminders

When reminders go live, GRAICE tells your clinic at least 14 days ahead. From then on:

• Only forms assigned after the go-live date get reminders. Nothing already assigned is emailed.
• A patient is reminded on the days the form sets: by default 2 and 5 days after it was assigned, then no more.
• Each reminder names your clinic and nothing else: not the patient, not the form. Reminders go out once a day, by default at 15:00 UTC (early morning in US time zones).
• Reminders stop when the form is completed, expires or is cancelled. Staff can stop them for one patient's form, and a patient can turn these emails off under Document Updates.
• Text message reminders are off. They need the patient's consent and other safeguards first.

Defaults chosen for your clinic

Some settings have no single right answer. Each was set to the most common practice in US healthcare, and can be changed later. Contact support if your clinic needs a different choice.

• Signing in counts as identity. A signed-in patient isn't asked for their date of birth. An emailed or in-clinic link asks for it, and locks after 5 wrong tries.
• In clinic, staff confirm identity. Handing a device to a patient needs the staff member to confirm the patient's identity, recorded under their name.
• Staff sign under their account name. A staff-only form's signature and a clinician's countersignature are recorded under the signer's account name, never a typed one.
• Resending is limited. A form's link can be emailed a few times an hour and a day, so a patient can't be emailed over and over.
• Who is notified. When a form is submitted, the staff member who assigned it and the patient's care team who can open it get a notice, without the answers. Owners and admins are told only if there is nobody else.
• Review notes are hidden in the patient's portal but are part of the record, and may be released if the patient asks for their records.
• Starter forms need the publisher to confirm they reviewed the wording. Review by your legal counsel is recommended, not required.
• Paper forms uploaded for AI drafting that turn out to be filled in are refused and recorded in the audit log for your privacy officer's routine review, not raised as an alert.

How long files are kept

• Completed forms are filed to the patient's chart and kept with their record.
• Paper forms uploaded for AI drafting are deleted when the draft is saved or discarded. If that doesn't happen, they can't be used after 24 hours and are removed by an automatic clean-up soon after.
• Files attached to a form question (when file uploads are on): a file the patient removes or replaces is deleted at the next clean-up, within about 15 minutes. A file on a form that is never submitted is deleted after 7 days. A submitted file is filed to the chart with the form. A deleted file can be recovered from storage for a short time afterwards; a record that the upload existed is kept.