A patient intake flow people finish
Clinic onboarding that was abandoned by more than half the patients who started it. We rebuilt the flow around the questions that actually gate care.
The brief
Marrow runs a network of outpatient clinics. Their digital intake form was a faithful copy of the paper one: 84 fields, no save, and a clinical vocabulary that assumed the reader was staff. Most patients gave up and finished at the front desk, which was the queue the form existed to remove.
What was actually wrong
The form treated every question as equally urgent, so a patient booking a first appointment answered insurance history before they had chosen a time. Front-desk staff were re-keying half-finished submissions, and the clinical team was chasing the fields that actually mattered by phone the day before.
How we worked
- 01
Sorted the questions by who needs them
We audited all 84 fields with the clinical lead against one test: does care stop without this today. Eleven did. The rest moved to after the booking or into the record staff already held.
- 02
Rewrote it in patient language
Every remaining question was rewritten to be answerable by someone without a clinical vocabulary, and read back to a panel of real patients before it shipped.
- 03
Made stopping safe
The flow saves on every step and resumes from a link, so an interrupted intake is finished on the sofa that evening rather than restarted at the desk.
- 04
Instrumented the drop-off
The clinic can now see which question loses people, week by week, which is what turns the form into something they keep improving without us.
What changed
Completion roughly doubled in the first month, and the front desk stopped re-keying. The bigger change was cultural: the clinical team now argues about which questions earn their place instead of adding more.
“We had assumed patients disliked forms. They disliked ours. Watching the team cut eighty questions down to eleven was uncomfortable and completely right.”
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