A reusable starting point for correspondence

Letter Templates give your clinic a reusable starting point for patient letters and correspondence — referral letters, discharge summaries, general correspondence, or anything else you send that follows a broadly consistent structure. You build the templates once here, in Settings > Letter Templates, and staff generate actual letters from them later, from an individual patient's record.

The benefit compounds the more a letter type repeats. A one-off letter you'll only ever send once isn't worth templating — just write it directly. But a referral letter format you use dozens of times a year is exactly the kind of thing that should live here: get the structure, tone, and required fields right once, and every practitioner who generates one after that starts from the same baseline instead of reinventing the format, or worse, omitting something a referring specialist expects to see.

In this article
  • What letter templates are for, and when templating a letter is worth it
  • Creating, editing, and removing a template
  • What happens to letters already generated when a template changes
  • Where templates are used from a patient's record
  • Why there's no AI drafting button on this particular page
Letter Templates settings page
The Letter Templates settings page showing a list of saved templates with edit and remove actions.

Creating a template

1

Open Letter Templates

Go to <strong>Settings &gt; Letter Templates</strong>.

2

Add a new template

Start a new template and give it a clear, descriptive name — name it by letter type or destination, for example <code>Referral — Orthopedic Specialist</code>, so staff can find the right one quickly when generating a letter for a specific purpose.

3

Write the content

Set up the body text and structure you want the letter to follow. Write it the way you want it to read in the final letter — this is the actual wording staff will send, lightly personalized per patient, not just a rough outline.

4

Save

Save the template to make it available immediately when staff generate a letter from a patient's record.

No "Generate with AI" on this page Unlike the SMS side of appointment templates elsewhere in ClinyPal, Letter Templates has no AI-assisted drafting button. You write the full content of the template yourself here — if you're looking for a way to have a first draft generated automatically, it doesn't exist on this particular page.

Editing and removing templates

Open an existing template from the list to change its name or content, or remove one you no longer need from the same list. It's worth revisiting your letter templates periodically — wording that reads fine internally sometimes reads oddly once a referring doctor or another clinic is actually the audience, and small corrections are easiest to make once, here, rather than patching each generated letter individually.

Existing letters aren't affected Changing or removing a template only affects new letters generated from it going forward. Letters already generated from that template keep their content exactly as saved — editing the template later does not rewrite letters that already went out.

Where templates are used

Templates you build here show up when staff generate a new letter from a patient's Letters tab, letting them start from consistent, pre-written content instead of a blank page. That's also where the actual per-patient generation, sending, and letter history live — this settings page is only ever the template source, not where letters themselves are produced or reviewed.

Frequently asked questions

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