When Patient Intake Forms Go Bad
On the surface, intake form design seems like an unusual topic for medical writers. At AMWA Northern California’s 2026 Pacific Coast Conference, Liz Fraley, BS, BA, MA, led a discussion titled “When intake forms go bad.” It might be unusual for a medical writer who is normally focused on regulatory documents or scientific publications to think about writing medical intake forms. However, this is an extremely relatable topic, as we all have experience filling out these forms as patients ourselves. And we all recognize an annoying form when we encounter one!
As Fraley spoke, the relevance of the topic became clear to anyone who creates interactive content, such as patient surveys, sales training materials, or knowledge check questions in continuing medical education. Moreover, the topic has greater implications in terms of data quality that drives clinical trials and other studies that medical writers regularly assess.
So, what is an intake form? And why do they go bad?
Intake forms, of course, are those sheets of paper on a clipboard that you must fill out in the waiting room before your appointment. Essentially, they are classic exercises in considering the user experience (UX). Fraley, a UX expert, presented five core principles for avoiding frustration and achieving successful data collection.
Avoid unnecessary effort. Don’t ask what you already know. Most patients have a pre-existing relationship with the clinic or health care network, so it is likely that much information can be pulled from an internal record. An example of this type of question is “When was your last physical exam?” When questions can be answered with “see my record,” clinicians are demanding unnecessary effort and creating user fatigue. It is always preferable to prepopulate forms with this information instead of making patients re-enter it.
Tailor forms to patient populations. Similar logic applies to irrelevant questions, such as asking about pregnancy to those assigned male at birth. With the patient's consent, prepopulating known data saves time. An additional modification is grouping queries into skippable sections. Form customization allows patients to fill in only what is relevant to them.
Reduce visual clutter. Don’t overwhelm the user with multiple pages—or screens, if the patient is filling out an electronic form. A long, dense form can be visually overwhelming, especially when viewed on a mobile screen. Pare information down to what is necessary, and remove distractions.
Minimalism is essential to UX, declared Fraley.
Design against fatigue. Fatigued users give low-quality data. Lengthy and complex forms create high cognitive load. (And what is our daily cognitive load, exactly? Here, Fraley presented some hard numbers. In 11.88 waking hours, the average person consumes approximately 34 gigabytes of data, or 100,000 words, meaning 23 words per second from screens, in-person conversation, and background noise.)
An example of a data collection format that requires unnecessary effort and takes time is the long lists of past or family medical conditions, especially if a response is required for each one. “Check only the ones that apply” is a better approach. Keep the experience as short and focused as possible.
Think like the patient. Consider how the patient might experience each question, and how each question relates to their mental or physical state. A question that makes clinical or research sense may seem oddly irrelevant from the patient's perspective. Fraley suggested that providing brief reasoning for why certain questions are asked can “go a long way.”
Throughout the session, a point that Fraley kept returning to was that increasing fatigue and irritation among a form’s respondents decreases the quality of the data collected. This point is the key to seeing the bigger picture beyond our relatively small grumbles over form fatigue in the doctor's waiting room. If you are a medical writer who writes interactive content containing survey or knowledge check questions, you need to make sure you’re enabling your client to harvest high-quality data. The principles Fraley explained can help us achieve that goal.
More and more medical writers are involved in analyzing clinical trial results and designs. Increasingly, those analyses will hinge on the quality of data collected in medical clinic intake forms. Answers on your clipboard are eventually entered into an electronic health record (EHR). Already, EHR systems are being leveraged for clinical trial recruitment, with automated prescreening and digital flags replacing manual chart reviews. There is a good chance you may soon be writing about a clinical trial in which this automation has occurred. Or you may end up taking a medication that resulted from such a clinical trial. So not only does good intake form design affect you on a micro level, it affects you on a macro level, too.
Liz Fraley made sure we will all be thinking about these issues next time we find ourselves holding a clipboard of papers at the doctor’s office.
About the authors: Megana Thamilselvan is a PhD candidate in Medical Science at the University of Toronto and an aspiring medical writer. She conducts research on psychiatric genetics using computational biostatistics tools. Megana brings a rigorous scientific foundation and a passion for knowledge dissemination to her writing.
Jennifer Epler is a freelance biomedical writer and founder of Concise Biomedical Writing, LLC. She earned her MA in science writing from Johns Hopkins University, an MS in immunology/cell biology from the University of Minnesota, and a BS in biochemistry from the University of Washington. Her business is focused primarily on continuing medical education/continuing professional development (CME/CPD) content creation and needs assessments. She loves a good clinical trial summary graphic, too.
