Procedures and forms

Administrators only, in Configuration. This is where you define what a patient can ask for and what they're asked before arriving.

The procedure catalogue

The list of reasons someone can request an appointment. Every clinic builds its own — there is no fixed catalogue per specialty.

Your clinic starts with four generic entries — consulta, control, procedimiento, otro — fine for testing, but worth replacing with real reasons quickly.

Each procedure has

• Code — internal identifier, short, no spaces or accents: limpieza, control_post_op. It's stored on the appointment. Choose it carefully: changing it later is awkward, because old appointments keep the code they were created with.
• Label — what the patient and your team read: Limpieza dental, Control post-operatorio. Write it in plain Spanish, the way a patient would describe their need.
• Intake form — optional; which questionnaire goes with this reason.
• Active — an inactive procedure stops being offered, but old appointments still show its label correctly.

Advice that actually changes the outcome

Shorter is better. WhatsApp caps how much of an option list it shows, and a patient picks faster from six options than from twenty-five. With thirty procedures, group them: Ortodoncia as one entry usually beats eight variants.

Write from the patient's side. Dolor de muela works better than Urgencia endodóntica. Patients pick what they recognise.

Don't delete, deactivate. That keeps historical appointments readable.

Intake forms

A short questionnaire the bot sends over WhatsApp after the patient confirms their appointment on the 24-hour reminder. It's optional for the patient: they can type salir and drop out at any point.

Building one

Each question is one of two types:

• Text — the patient answers freely.
• Single choice — the patient picks from a list. With three options or fewer WhatsApp shows buttons; with more, a dropdown list.

You can have one default form, used when a procedure doesn't specify another, plus specific forms for specific procedures.

Rules of thumb

Keep it short. This is answered on a phone, often while walking. Five questions is a lot; three works well.

Don't ask what you already know. Name, phone and reason for the visit are already on the appointment.

Edit freely. If a patient is midway through a questionnaire when you change it, they finish with the questions they started with. Changes apply from the next patient onward.

Where the answers go

To the dashboard, on the appointment detail. You can also configure two automatic deliveries in Configuration:

• A webhook to a system of yours, signed so you can verify the message came from us.
• A summary to a staff WhatsApp group.

Both are best-effort: if they fail, the error is logged but the patient's appointment is unaffected. There is no retry and no alert today, so if your clinic depends on the webhook, cross-check it against the dashboard from time to time.

Answers are deleted 72 hours after the appointment. They are the only health data Pingclínica stores and they are removed on purpose. If you need to keep them, receive them by webhook or download them first.