Patient onboarding in circleOS usually happens through a workflow, not one single screen. The goal is to give the patient the right links, forms, and follow-up items before your team needs to chase them manually.
In practice, most teams combine:
- a service or variant booking link when the patient still needs to choose a slot
- a product-variant checkout link when the patient should buy a specific product rather than book a visit
- an appointment link when the patient already has a booking and needs to return to it
- one or more required forms
- active plans, published documents, or published results when follow-up material should be available to the patient
A practical onboarding flow
- Share the right entry link. That is usually a service or service-variant booking link, but for some direct-purchase flows it is a product-variant checkout link. If the booking already exists, share the appointment link from that booking instead.
- Add any forms the patient must complete, usually through service requirements or a one-off patient requirement.
- Send the patient the forms link by email, SMS, or QR code from the required-forms workflow.
- Review the submission in Patient profile → Form submissions. If it belongs to a booking, you can also review it from that booking workflow.
- Only share follow-up items after they are actually patient-ready, for example an active plan or a published document.
If the patient is standing with your team in clinic, QR is usually the quickest step. If they are remote, email or SMS is usually easier to follow up on.
What patients can complete themselves
Patients can usually handle the parts that do not require staff review:
- choosing a slot from a service or variant booking link
- opening a direct checkout flow from a product-variant link when that flow is used
- opening an existing booking, and in some flows cancelling it from the patient app
- intake, consent, and other required forms
- opening active plans, published documents, or other patient-facing records you have shared with them
What stays with your team
Your team still owns the operational decisions:
- choosing which patient-facing link belongs in the workflow
- creating and maintaining form requirements
- checking that submissions are complete and valid
- activating plans and publishing documents before sharing them
- following up when something is missing or incorrect
A useful pattern
If a service uses intake forms, the cleanest workflow is to keep sending patients back to the same forms entry point instead of asking them to find the right form themselves.
When you use the action menu, send Copy share link → Copy Patient App URL only from pages that are already patient-ready. For example, plans should be active before you send their patient link, and documents should be published before they are shared that way. Diagnostic-result sharing also depends on your results workflow publishing the linked result documents.
For more on the patient-facing forms flow, see Forms in the Patient Portal. For a broader map of patient-facing links, see Patient Portal Overview.