The patient experience: self-setup, portal, and self-service
What patients can do on their own device — setup links, intake, insurance, consents, booking, and payment — and how you enable each piece.
Ona pushes as much as possible onto the patient's own device — intake, insurance, consent, booking, payment — so your front desk isn't retyping what the patient could enter themselves. This article covers the patient-facing side from the clinic's point of view: what patients can do, and how you enable each piece.
Self-setup: the patient fills in their own record
Every patient record has a Details & Settings page holding their profile, contact, address, emergency contact, and insurance.
Rather than fill this in for the patient, you can send them a link to do it themselves. Use Share a setup link at the top of the page.
The popover explains it: "Share a secure setup link — [patient] fills in their details, insurance and payment method." You can Copy setup link to send over SMS or email, or show a QR Code for a patient in the waiting room to scan.
Two things make this the efficient path. It's no-login — a confirmation toast notes the patient can "fill in their details without logging in," so there's no account hurdle before a first visit. And it covers insurance and payment method, not just demographics, so the patient enters their own insurance card and card-on-file, which is exactly the data that's error-prone when a receptionist keys it from a photo.
A note on the setup link: it's a secure, no-login credential that grants access to a specific patient's record fields. Treat it like a password — send it only to that patient, over a channel you trust, and don't post or forward it.
Intake: questionnaires and consents
Before a visit, patients complete the forms you send them:
- Questionnaires — intake and history forms. Attach them to a service and they send automatically when that service is booked; their answers land on the patient record. See Building intake questionnaires.
- Consents — treatment, telehealth, privacy. Same pattern: attach to a service, patient signs, the signed consent attaches to their record. See Building consent forms.
So a booked appointment can trigger the whole intake packet — details, questionnaire, consent — without anyone assembling it by hand.
Self-scheduling: patients book themselves
With booking pages enabled (see Your website and online scheduling), patients book their own appointments from your public booking page. What's bookable comes from your services and clinician availability, so patients only ever see real, open slots. This turns a phone call into a self-service action.
Telehealth: patients join from a link
For a video visit, you send the patient their meeting link (the copy button on the visit's call bar; see Telehealth visits). They join from that link — no app to install, no account needed for the call itself.
Messaging: two-way contact
Patients reach your practice, and you reach them, through Omnichannel — SMS and email that land in one inbox (see Omnichannel messaging). Appointment reminders, follow-up questions, and the setup and booking links above all travel over these channels.
Payment: patients pay their own invoices
Invoices go to the patient and are paid by card through Stripe (see Invoices and patient payments). Combined with the payment method captured during self-setup, a patient can be charged — or pay an invoice themselves — without handing a card to the front desk.
The whole patient journey
Put together, a patient can do almost everything without staff keying it in:
- Book themselves on the public booking page.
- Set up their record via the setup link — details, insurance, payment.
- Complete the questionnaire and sign the consent that the booking sent them.
- Attend — in person, or join a telehealth link.
- Pay their invoice by card.
Your job shifts from data entry to sending the right link at the right moment. The articles referenced above cover each enabling step in detail.
A note on scope
This article describes the patient experience from the clinic's side — what you send and enable, and what data patients provide. The patient's own on-screen views (the setup form, the portal as the patient sees it) are reached through the secure no-login setup link, which is a per-patient credential and isn't reproduced here. If you're producing guides for patients — screenshots of their screens with step-by-step instructions — those should be captured from a genuine patient session with test data, not from the clinic-side view.
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