IN THIS ARTICLE
Introduction to Custom Fields
As a provider, the best way to capture all of your patient’s vital details is to include custom fields in your database that denote information like insurance carrier, preferred pharmacy, emergency contact, mailing address, and more. Spruce arrives out of the box with fields that include date of birth, gender, and contact information, but if you’d like to create a set of custom fields specific to your practice, you can either add them contact by contact, or as a high level template change so that every patient record will include the custom fields most helpful to your business.
Add a Custom Field
To add a Custom Field to an individual record, just go to a specific contact record, press “Edit” in the top right corner, and then scroll down to the “Additional Fields” section. Click on “+add another field” and label it in any way that helps you best identify that piece of information. Then add your free form text and “Save” the new content. Now when you go back to the initial record, you will see the newly added field. You may add as many fields as you like.
To add a Custom Field to your high level template, thereby affecting every contact in your database, just go to your Settings folder, then drop down to “Organization Preferences”.
From there you can click on “Custom Field Defaults for Contacts”, “Add Field”, and enter the name and corresponding text value for that new field. You may add as many custom fields as you like, and they are not limited by character count, so you can ultimately use the field like a note-taking option, with multi-line functionality.
Example of multi-line mailing address as a Custom Field:
Carrie Jones
123 Main Street
San Francisco, CA
94122
Patient Preferences
Custom fields are also useful for storing patient preferences, for instance, how they would like to be contacted. Would they prefer a phone call or a text message? This is an easy and efficient way to ensure accuracy, personalization, and organization across your records.
Access to Custom Fields
The administrator on your account will have complete access to the Custom Field feature and may add new custom fields at any time. Any staff in a non-admin role can add specific fields to an individual contact, but not as a global template change. Note: if you’re a single provider, you are the admin on your account.
The process outlined above may be managed from your computer or your phone.