Build a custom patient intake questionnaire on Healthie in under 30 minutes
Product · Developer Guide · 4 min read
The intake questionnaire is often the first thing a patient interacts with before their first appointment. It shapes what the provider knows walking in, what gets documented, and how care gets coordinated from there.
Healthie is built API-first, which means every part of the product — including intake questionnaires — is programmable. The form template, its questions, and its conditional logic are all objects you can create and modify directly. Using Dev Assist, Healthie's MCP server for AI coding agents, you can go from nothing to a working custom intake form in under 30 minutes.
"Healthie's API product allowed us to plug in critical features, including charting, scheduling, and intake forms, while staying focused on building our differentiated experience."
Joe Getz, Head of Product, Opt Health · Read the case study
Who this is for
Engineers and technical ops leads who want to own their intake workflow end to end. You'll need basic code comfort or a coding agent alongside you.
The teams that get the most out of it are the ones who need their intake layer to do something specific — conditional routing, external ID mapping for third-party systems, automated downstream actions when a patient submits. The API supports all of it.
What you can build
- Specialty-specific intake flows with different question sets per condition or care track
- Pre-visit forms with conditional logic based on appointment type or prior answers
- Onboarding questionnaires tied to specific patient populations or programs
Every feature in Healthie's product is accessible via the same GraphQL API. There's no gap between what the UI can do and what you can build.
How Healthie forms work
Three objects make up the forms layer. Understanding these before writing any code makes the build straightforward.
CustomModuleForm is the form template — the container that holds all the questions. When creating an intake form, you'll set it to intake-only mode so it stays out of charting and programs.
CustomModule is an individual question. Each one has a type (free text, checkbox, dropdown, and others), a position in the form, and an optional setting that makes it appear only when a patient gives a specific answer to a prior question.
FormAnswerGroup is a patient's completed submission. When a patient finishes and submits, one of these is created — containing one answer per question — and a webhook fires so your system can respond in real time.
Full reference in the forms guide and the submitted answers guide.
Building your intake form
Step 1 — Set up Dev Assist
First, set up a sandbox account and generate a sandbox API key — you'll need this before you can run any queries or mutations.
Dev Assist connects your coding agent directly to Healthie's staging environment. It's staging-only by design — it does not connect to production. The latest version cuts the back-and-forth between agent and API dramatically, and most form builds resolve in one session.
Once your sandbox key is ready, clone the repo and follow the Dev Assist setup guide to connect it to your coding agent of choice.
Step 2 — Create the form template
Create the form container first, then add questions to it one by one. Each question can be a different type — free text, checkbox, dropdown, scale, and others. If you want a question to appear only when a patient selects a specific answer earlier in the form, you set a reference to that earlier question when creating it.
The forms guide covers all available field types and input options.
Step 3 — Move to production
Dev Assist is a development and exploration tool — it's not designed to generate production-ready code. Before pointing anything at api.gethealthie.com/graphql, review everything you've built: test your form logic thoroughly, validate that your API calls handle errors correctly, and make sure your implementation meets your own security and compliance standards. The move to production is yours to own.
"I spent a whole year doing research, and talked to almost every EHR and API solution on the market, comparing product robustness, security, pricing, and support level. Finally, I found Healthie."
Guorui Su, CPO and Cofounder, Klarity Health · Read the case study
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