Making Patient Friendly Intake Forms

In the health care setting, intake forms are often not comprensible to patients. In order to obtain accurate information, questions must be presented in a way that allows the information to be utilized both for patient care and medical research.  In the pediatric headache community there is a range of conditions including migraine, tension type headache, and cluster headache/ other trigeminal autonomic cephalagias. Each of these headache histories requires different treatment protocols and varying levels of specialist care. Therefore it is essential to have good new patient screening methods in order to establish the patient’s needs before the initial office visit. With the initiation of the headache center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia we created intake forms that were not only patient friendly, but also extensive so to be able to abstract the patient history for clinical purposes as well as for future research.