Download it
Download the patient intake form (CSV)
CSV opens in Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets, and prints. It is deliberately not a fillable PDF: a PDF that has to be re-typed into a system is the problem this page is about.
What belongs on a patient intake form
An intake form is a data-collection decision, and over-collection has real costs: longer forms get abandoned or half-completed, and every field you collect is information you now hold and must protect. The template includes what downstream workflows actually consume — and nothing else.
Identity and contact: legal name, date of birth, address, phone, email, and preferred contact method. Payer details: insurer, member ID, group number, subscriber name and relationship — in the structure billing reads, because a transposed member ID surfaces weeks later as a rejected claim. History: current concerns, relevant conditions, medications and allergies, scoped to what the treating clinician needs at a first visit. Consents and policies: consent to treat, privacy acknowledgment, financial policy and cancellation policy — each with its own signature line, since a single signature covering all four is far weaker if any one of them is ever disputed.
The pediatric version adds guardian identity and relationship, household and custody notes where relevant, school information, and guardian signatures throughout — the patient is the child; the paperwork belongs to the adult.
What does not belong on an intake form
Social security numbers (payers stopped needing them; do not hold them), full financial details beyond the card used to pay, and clinical deep-dives that belong in the clinician’s assessment conversation. If a field’s answer never changes a workflow, delete the field.
How digital intake removes the retyping step
A paper or PDF form ends its life being retyped into the practice management system, and that transcription is where member IDs transpose and names lose their spelling.
In MegAligna, intake goes to the patient or guardian as a link before the first visit, and the answers land as structured chart fields: demographics as demographics, payer details in the shape billing reads, and consents as signed, versioned documents.
Collecting this on paper and typing it in afterwards is the failure this template cannot fix. Patient intake software writes the same fields straight into the chart, including the release and assignment consents that Boxes 12 and 13 of the CMS-1500 depend on.
Common questions
Should intake be completed before or at the first visit?
How often should returning patients redo intake?
Can we use this template as-is?
Try it end to end with test data
14 days, no card required. Use made-up patients while you evaluate — real patient information waits until a business associate agreement is in place.