Building interviews

An interview is a conversation, not a form. The patient opens a link and has a chat: Ona asks about the subjects you defined, in plain language, and follows up when an answer is vague or opens something worth pursuing. You get back a structured summary and clinical records on the chart, usually before the patient arrives.

This is the opposite of a Form, which shows every patient the same questions in the same order and ends in a signature. If you need fixed wording or a signature, build a form instead — see Forms or interviews — which to use.

The Interviews page

Go to Library → Interviews — "create and manage conversational interviews completed with Ona".

Along the top are your interviews, each showing its step and subject counts with Send and Try out actions, plus New Interview. Below is the Library of predefined interviews "ready to import and customize".

Import a ready-made interview

The library is tagged All, Default, Intake, Follow-up, Mental Health, Functional Medicine. Each card lists its first few steps so you can see the shape before taking it:

• Default Ona Interview — the built-in interview template.
• Initial Health Intake — broad first-visit interview for history, symptoms, goals.
• Follow-up Review — shorter, for progress and new concerns.
• Mental Health Check-in — structured check-in for mood, anxiety, sleep, risk.
• Functional Medicine Intake — systems-based across symptoms, digestion, hormones, lifestyle.

Use Preview to read one, Import to copy it into your own set where you can edit it.

Note that the Mental Health Check-in covers the same ground as a screening instrument but does not produce a score or total. If you need a scored instrument, that isn't what interviews do today.

Steps and subjects

Interviews are built from steps, each grouping a related area — "Reason for Visit", "Medical Background", "Lifestyle and Context". Within a step you add subjects: the specific topics to cover, each with optional details that tell Ona how to handle it.

The important distinction is that a subject is a topic, not a question. You are not writing the words the patient reads — Ona phrases the question, and phrases it differently depending on what the patient has already said. The details field is where you steer that: notes like "if they name a symptom, ask whether they've ever had a formal diagnosis for it" shape the follow-ups without scripting them.

Break an interview into steps the way a patient thinks about their history, not the way your chart is organized. A step per topic — reason for visit, medications, lifestyle — completes better than one wall of subjects.

Steps can be reordered, and there's one predefined step type available: Medical Tests and Lab Results, whose subjects are managed automatically rather than edited by hand.

Send or test

Each of your interviews has two actions:

• Send — deliver it to a patient to complete.
• Try out — walk through it yourself, exactly as the patient would.

Try out runs the real conversation, not a mock-up, and writes no record — nothing lands on any patient. Always try an interview once before sending it to a real patient. It's the quickest way to catch a subject that reads oddly or a step in the wrong order.

What the patient experiences

The patient opens a secure one-time link — no sign-in, no app, expires after about two weeks and stops working once used. Patients with a portal login can complete interviews there instead.

They see a chat with a step progress rail down the side. Ona asks, they type, Ona follows up. Moving between steps isn't a "next" button they control: a Continue to {next step} button only appears once Ona judges the current step to be covered, and the last step ends with Finish Assessment. That means a patient can't skip past a topic — but it also means a step ends when the conversation is done, not when a fixed list runs out.

What you get back

Open a completed interview from the patient record and you'll find three tabs:

• Results — the structured summary, in six sections: Working Well, Areas of Attention, Insights & Focus Areas, Next Steps, Daily Checklist, and Timeline & Follow-up. Items on the Daily Checklist flow through to the patient's recommendations.
• Conversation — the full transcript, including anything the patient attached.
• Clinical Records — diagnoses, observations, allergies and medications extracted from the conversation, as editable records linked back to the interview that produced them.

That last tab is what a form can't do. A form's answers stay a document; an interview's answers become structured chart data.

The summary takes a moment to generate after the patient finishes — the panel shows Generating insights… and updates itself when it's ready.

Interviews appear on the patient and consultation record under Inputs → Interviews, grouped into In progress and Completed. In-progress rows carry a Copy link action if the patient lost the email.

Editing a template later

When an interview is sent, its steps are snapshotted onto that patient's copy. Editing the template afterwards changes what future patients get, and leaves interviews already in flight or already completed exactly as they were.

An interview that's attached to a service can't be deleted until you remove it from that service first.

Automatic sending

The efficient way to use interviews is not to send them by hand at all. Attach an interview to a Service (under Setting up services → Interviews tab), and it's selected automatically whenever that service is booked. Booking the appointment sends the intake — and if the service also carries forms or consents, the patient gets one email listing all of them rather than three separate ones.

Interviews can also be selected ad hoc while creating a visit — see Creating a consultation / starting a visit.