Generic HTML forms vs. IntakeQ
A couple of people interested in converting their intake forms to the web have asked us the following question:
"Why would I choose your service versus creating and embedding my own forms with a service such as phpform.org?"
Here's our answer: While services like phpform are great for quickly generating HTML code, you will still need to have something on your server to handle and store the data from the forms. After you generate your HTML form in phpform.org, they will usually upsell you a paid product. Even though they only charge a one-time fee, you are responsible for hosting it on a server that runs PHP and a MySQL database.
With growing privacy concerns and HIPAA/PIPEDA regulations, it's also crucial to protect patients' private information when it's being transferred and stored, which would greatly increase the hosting costs (HIPAA compliant hosting is usually more than $500 per month!)
What we provide is different from generic form builders in the following ways:
1) We host your forms and we are secure by default. All our transactions are SSL encrypted and we work with http://truevault.com to make sure all patient information is stored securely.
2) We allow you to send intake forms to your clients privately. The forms don't even need to be on your website (some practitioners don't want their forms to be publicly available)
3) If you choose to have the forms on your website, you do it by using URLs that you get from IntakeQ. These URLs lead to web forms that are hosted on our secure servers.
4) In your IntakeQ account, you can manage your forms, see which sent forms are pending completion, which forms were completed, print them in a nice PDF format, search them by patient name, send follow-up forms, setup notifications, etc.
5) We allow your patients to sign your intake or consent forms electronically, allowing you to completely eliminate intake paperwork.
In short, our service was built specifically for health intake forms, so we work to solve this problem really well.