How to Auto-Fill the Client Record From Practice Better Forms

If you've ever finished a new client's intake and then sat there copying their medications, health history and goals into the chart by hand, this post is for you.

Practice Better has a feature that does that for you. It's called form mappings, and it's one of the most genuinely useful things in the whole platform. It's also one of the things we most often find switched off when we look inside an account.

Here's how it works and how to set it up properly.

What form mappings actually do

A form mapping connects a question on a form to a field in the client record.

So when a client answers "What supplements are you currently taking?" on your intake, that answer can land directly in the Medications and Supplements section of their chart. Nobody retypes it. Nobody forgets to. The chart is populated the moment the form is completed.

Set up once, it runs on every intake after that.

Where to find them

There are two routes to the same place:

• Settings > All Settings & Preferences > Forms & Signature
• My Practice > Forms & Waivers, then the Mappings & Settings tab

How to set one up

• Click to add a mapping and choose the form you want to map.
• For each question, choose the destination field in the client record.
• If you want every question mapped at once, use Add all, then adjust anything that landed somewhere odd.
• Decide whether each mapping should overwrite or append (more on this below).
• Save.

Then go and turn on the automation that makes it run without anyone clicking anything:

My Practice > Automations, and switch on Import completed form data into a client's file.

That second step is the one people miss. Without it, the mapping exists but someone still has to trigger the import.

Overwrite or append?

This setting is off by default, which means answers append to what's already there.

Append is usually right for recurring forms, like a monthly check-in, because you want the history. Overwrite is usually right for a re-intake, where the new answer should replace the old one. Decide per mapping, deliberately. It's a small choice that matters a lot six months later.

What can map where

The client record has a set of destination sections: Basic Information, Medical History (family history, personal health history, medications and supplements, diagnosis codes), Diet & Lifestyle, Measurements & Vitals, Protocols, Labs, Journals, Tasks, Documents and Lifestyle Recommendations.

Two things worth knowing before you design your intake around them:

Diet & Lifestyle has six specific fields: main stressors, dietary restrictions, sleep patterns, exercise regimen, contentment and creativity. Nutrition practices sometimes expect more structure than that, so plan your questions to fit.

There are no custom fields. If a question doesn't have a natural home, route it to that section's Additional Notes, or to Personal Information: Notes. It's better to know this going in than to discover it mid-build.

Emergency contacts

If you want an emergency or secondary contact to import, use the Personal Information/Contact person question type. The client needs to supply both a name and an email for it to come through.

Test it before you trust it

Fill out your own intake as a test client. Then open that client's record and check that every answer landed where you expected. Mappings are easy to get almost right, and almost right is how a medication list ends up in the wrong section.

One more thing to know: if your form uses conditional logic, completed-form PDFs and exports only include the questions that client actually saw. So an export across many clients can look uneven. That's expected, and worth knowing before you build any reporting on top of it.

The short version

Form mappings turn your intake from a document you read into data that lives in the chart. It's maybe an hour to set up properly, and it gives you back that hour every week after.

Would rather hand this to someone?

Our Practice Better setup is $997 for one practitioner, one location and up to three programs, whether you're building from scratch or fixing what you have. Form mappings, automations, permissions, all of it, tested end to end.