Add a patient

Adding a patient is deliberately cheap. A name is enough to create a record, and everything else — birth date, address, insurance, payment method — can arrive later, either from you or from the patient. The question worth answering at creation time isn't "do I have all their details?" but "who is going to enter them?"

The Patients list

Go to Patients in the left sidebar.

Columns run Patient (name and email), Phone, Birth Date, Insurance, Status, Tags, and Added. The Insurance column only appears if your organization has the insurance flow switched on, and Added is the only sortable column. Tags are editable straight from the row, and the row menu on the right archives a patient.

Status is worth reading carefully, because it isn't a field anyone sets:

• Invited — an invitation has been emailed and not yet accepted.
• Active — everything else, including patients who were never invited and patients who have signed up.
• Archived — archived from the row menu.

So an Active patient hasn't necessarily done anything. If you want to know who has actually been invited, use the Invitation filter rather than the Status column: it offers All, Not invited, Invited, and Signed up. Alongside it, search matches on name, email, or phone, and admins get a Manage button for tags plus the Outstanding A/R and Revenue this month cards below.

The chevron on an Invited badge opens two actions: Copy invitation link, to send over another channel, and Resend invitation, which issues a fresh email. Both only exist once an invitation has been sent — the badge is what tells you one is outstanding.

Adding a patient

Click Add Patient.

The sheet says what it needs: "Only a name is needed to get started — everything else can be filled in afterwards." First name and Last name are required. Email is not. A line beside the Add Patient button tells you what will happen when you submit — Ready — an invitation will be emailed, or Ready — no invitation will be sent.

The email is the invitation

There is no separate "invite" step. As the field's helper text puts it, "When provided, the patient is emailed an invitation to access the patient portal."

• With an email, the patient is created and the portal invitation goes out immediately. They appear in the list as Invited.
• Without one, the patient is created quietly and appears as Active. Nothing is sent.

Invitation links expire after seven days. An expired one swaps its icon for a warning and drops the copy option, leaving Resend invitation as the only way forward. If you skipped the email, you can add one and invite them later from the record itself.

Filling in the rest

Adding a patient from the Patients list takes you straight to their Details & Settings page — the record is created, and this is where it gets filled in.

The rail on the left moves between Personal, Contact, Account, Address, Emergency, and Insurance (the last only with the insurance flow enabled). Nothing saves as you type: change something and a bar appears at the foot of the page with Discard and Save changes.

From here there are two ways to finish the record.

Type it in yourself. Work down the sections and save. Account & Invitation is the section to know about — it's where Send invitation, Resend invitation, and Copy link live, and where an Add email button appears if there's no address on file. One ordering trap: an email typed into Contact has to be saved before Send invitation will use it, so save first, then send.

Let the patient do it. Share a setup link at the top right gives you a secure, no-login link to copy, or a QR Code for someone standing in front of you. The patient fills in their own details, insurance, and payment method — which is exactly the data that goes wrong when a receptionist keys it from a photo of a card. See The patient experience: self-setup, portal, and self-service for what the patient sees and how to treat the link.

Other ways to add a patient

• While booking. The Create New Visit dialog has a New patient button beside the Patient field. It opens the same sheet, and on submit it selects the new patient in the picker and leaves you in the dialog — you don't lose the booking. See Creating a consultation / starting a visit.
• From Spotlight. The Add a patient command in Spotlight search opens the same sheet from anywhere, and does navigate to the new record afterwards. See Spotlight search.

Why it's built this way

A record that requires a full intake before it can exist pushes work to the wrong moment — the phone call, the front desk, the queue. Requiring only a name means the record exists as soon as the patient does, and a medical record number is generated with it (it sits beside Export at the foot of the record sidebar), so nothing downstream is blocked by empty fields.

That leaves you one decision each time: enter the details, or send the link. Send the link when there's time before the visit and the patient has a phone — they're the authority on their own insurance and address anyway. Enter it yourself when they're already in front of you and it's faster to just ask.