Patient Record: Details Tab

The record's foundation

The Details tab is where a patient record starts: the demographic and contact information you fill in once, when the patient is first added, and rarely touch again unless something genuinely changes — a new phone number, a change of address, an updated emergency contact. Everything else in the record, from appointments to invoices, is built around the identity established here.

Because this tab is opened constantly — every time a receptionist confirms a phone number, every time a practitioner double-checks a date of birth before a procedure — it's worth treating as more than a form to fill in once and forget. Keeping it accurate is what makes reminders land on the right number, letters address the right person, and invoices go to the right billing contact.

The Details tab of a patient record showing demographic fields, contact information, and a custom fields section below the built-in fields.

What's built in

The built-in fields on this tab cover the basics every clinic needs regardless of specialty: legal name, date of birth, contact numbers, email, and mailing address, along with any emergency contact or next-of-kin information your clinic collects. These fields exist for every patient in every ClinyPal clinic — they aren't configurable per clinic the way custom fields are, because they underpin core functionality like appointment reminders and invoice addressing.

• <strong>Identity fields</strong> — legal name and date of birth, used throughout the record and on printed documents.
• <strong>Contact fields</strong> — phone number(s) and email, which is what SMS and email communications (confirmations, reminders, broadcasts) are sent to.
• <strong>Address</strong> — used on letters and invoices where a mailing address is expected.
• <strong>Emergency or next-of-kin details</strong> — kept for reference, not used automatically by any messaging feature.

Custom fields appear here too

Below the built-in fields, this tab also renders any custom patient fields your clinic's admin has set up. Custom fields let a clinic capture information specific to its own practice — an allergy flag, an insurance policy number, a preferred language, a referring specialist — without ClinyPal needing to hard-code every possible field a clinic might want. They're built using the same Dynamic Form Builder that powers forms elsewhere in ClinyPal, which is why their field types (text, dropdown, date, checkbox, and so on) will look familiar if you've filled out a patient form.

Custom fields show up in the order the admin arranged them in Settings, and every patient record in the clinic gets the same set — you can't add a one-off field to a single patient from this tab. If a field looks like it's missing for one patient but present for another, the more likely explanation is that it was added or reordered recently and you're comparing records that were viewed before and after the change, not that the field is patient-specific.

Editing a patient's details

Editing here is a straightforward field-and-save procedure, but it's still worth being deliberate about it — this is the data every downstream feature relies on, so a typo in a phone number silently breaks SMS reminders for that patient until someone notices.

Frequently asked questions