eForms

[jordansparks]

We are aggressively building eForms. This brand new framework will completely replace mobile sheets and webforms. It will be used for patient forms, insurance info, medical history, and consent forms. Normal sheets could still be used, and it will not otherwise replace sheets in general because sheets are used for many other things besides those four. We considered further adapting mobile sheets, but there was just too much historical baggage. The only way to make it really powerful is to start from scratch. The good news is that we know exactly what we want to build because we can take the very best of mobile sheets and the very best ideas from other form products. eForms will be available on eClipboard, on the web, and directly from within Open Dental on desktop. As usual, we don't do vaporware, so no promises at all on when we will finish or even if we will finish. But I'm spending most of my personal time on this feature now, and we have a very good team of engineers implementing it. I can't think of anything that would stop us other than if we have to shift to something else even more important.

[dpat08]

Will you be able to implement a feature to show or hide questions based on a parameter? E.g. We see a child under age 3. We need to ask about pacifier, bottle/nursing habits, etc. We don't need to ask those things for a teenager in our practice. We also have certain questions (50+?) we have to ask for patient's with medicaid insurance that we don't have to ask for private insurance.

I hope you implement all of the features of Flex. We use them and love their forms and they allow us to do both of those things listed above.

You can see an example of them at StorybookSmiles.com. Just scroll to the bottom and click New Patient Forms English.

[dpat08]

Their health history is amazing. It's practically a review of systems. Any heart problems? If you select no then it goes to the next system, but if you select yes it pops open with a list of the most common heart problems to select from. Comprehensive and easy to get through quickly which is a rare thing.

[jordansparks]

Yes, it has conditional logic support, but that feature is not quite as powerful as Flex yet. The parent conditions can be any radio button or check box. That's all built and working well. It's fantastic. But the parent condition cannot yet be an age derived from a birthdate. I will consider where that falls in the priority list, and if it doesn't make it into the initial release, it could follow soon after.

Yes, we took a good long look at Flex before we started, but we didn't copy it. We took the best ideas and ignored the parts that weren't as slick. For example, we did widths differently to give you a lot more power than just increments of 25%. We also went with a full WYSIWYG setup window, complete with drag and drop. It was worth the effort and it makes it much easier to do setup. We should have done all of this 10 years ago, but at least we're doing it now.

Our current focus is on duplicating every single feature that mobile sheets has. This will allow us to quickly deprecate mobile sheets and have everyone transition over to eForms. Then, we will continue to add features that will make it more competitive with Flex and make it much better than the original mobile sheets. That's when we will do a series of overhauls on the importing process to make it more automated.

[dpat08]

Good news to hear that you are working on some things they have. I hope you get 100% there eventually in the next year or so. I really like Flex, but with the number of patients per day and number of integrations we have going on (Flex, Vyne and Zuub) it can slow down responsiveness of OD when the 3rd party applications are checking ODs database. It would be great to have it all under one roof with OD one day with native integration.

[jordansparks]

Yes, we have added age-based conditions. It is fully functional. Still not released yet because we're building the server side that patients will actually navigate to in order to fill out the forms.

[dpat08]

Fantastic! Sounds like it will be a great new foundation for all of us.

[jordansparks]

We also added fixed vs. percentage field widths, optional 3D border boxes around each field, and a bunch of other fluff that I wanted to put into a later version. But the early testers complained way too much about some of these lacking features, so we added them. Since they are still working on the server, we'll just keep adding features to the UI while we wait. This should result in a very rich set of features in version 1. At this rate we might have time to include theme colors somehow, and maybe even images.

[dpat08]

Images or fonts would be great.

Is this a month away? A year away? Still TBD?

[jordansparks]

Regarding fonts, all label type fields support rich text, including text color, background color, font size, bold, underline, paragraph left margin, paragraph alignment, and paragraph hanging indent. We don't actually have an option for different font families like Arial vs Times yet. I'll think about that.

We're hitting import automation very hard now. So, as one example of thousands, this means that if the patient deletes their first name on a form, you have control over whether you ignore that change, flag it for human review, etc. We are setting up all the rules that we think make sense, but power users can go fiddle with the rules. It's cool. The absence of this rule system is why we never fully automated import previously. It was too dangerous.

As for the question of timing, I was shooting for this month. But software is software, and it frequently gets delayed. The part we're waiting for is the web side of things. My best guess is about 3 months to beta, but it's only a guess. We don't do vaporware, and we never make promises. Until it actually gets released, everything I'm saying is just noise. But I still thought people might be interested in knowing about it. Because we missed my target, we are assigning more engineers to it. That usually helps.

[StevenW]

Will the new eForms generate a copy of the completed form that can be saved in the imaging module?

[jordansparks]

That's the idea. We want them to do everything that mobile sheets can do, including that. We'll see if that particular feature makes it into the very first version or not. Most of our engineering effort over the last week seems to have been going into powerful layout options like handling percentage widths when they start wrapping, horizontal stacking for radio buttons, wrapping labels, and that sort of thing. Our testers keep clamoring for more, so we can't stop until they are happy. I consider a lot of that fluff, and I would have preferred to wait on it, but I also do understand that it must look very good.

[jordansparks]

Looks like the in-office version will be coming out first, and the web version will follow months later. The in-office version means eClipboard rewritten in a newer programming language. You hand the patient a tablet and they fill out the forms in the office. The ability to use those same eForms for the web to fill out from home is what will come later.