A new-patient intake is the visit where templates earn their cost. The visit is long, the documentation is long, and the structure varies by clinician more than any other visit type. A psychiatrist’s intake reads differently from a therapist’s intake, which reads differently from a NP’s medication-management intake. The default templates that ship with any documentation product are a starting point at best.
This guide walks through building a custom intake template in Nextvisit in about 15 minutes. The same pattern works for
any visit type, but intakes are where the time savings compound fastest. The template editor lives at
/apps/custom-prompts. Editing an existing template happens at /apps/custom-prompts/[id]/edit.
Step 1: bring a real intake note
Open a recent intake note that you wrote yourself, ideally one you would be happy to receive from another clinician. Anonymize it. Strip the PHI. Keep the structure, the section headings, the prose patterns, and the level of detail.
This is the single most important input. The template editor produces output that mirrors the example you give it. A polished real note in, a polished real-style template out. A messy one in, a messy template out.
If you do not have a recent intake that meets the bar, write one fresh against a hypothetical patient. Use real clinical detail. The 10 minutes you spend writing the example is the difference between a template you will keep and a template you will replace next month.
Step 2: open the template editor
Navigate to /apps/custom-prompts and click New Template. Give it a name that will be obvious six months from now. ”
Intake (psychiatry, adult)” beats “intake_v3.”
The editor has two main areas: the prompt body, which is the natural-language description of what you want the note to look like, and the variable token list, which is what AriaMD substitutes at runtime.
Step 3: paste the example, then describe the structure
In the prompt body, start with a short description of the visit type and the clinician audience. One or two sentences:
Adult outpatient psychiatry intake, 60 minutes. Generate the note in the structure below, in the voice of the treating psychiatrist, using clinical vocabulary appropriate to outpatient adult psychiatry.
Then paste the anonymized example below it. Above the example, write “Use the following note as the structural and stylistic reference.”
The natural-language prompt plus the worked example is more reliable than either one alone. The prompt sets intent, the example sets shape.
Step 4: insert variable tokens
Replace the demographic and visit-context fields in the example with tokens. The available tokens at the time of writing:
[patient_name][dob][age][gender][profession][provider_name][duration]
So the header of the example might transform from “Jane Doe, 34F, occupation: librarian, seen by Dr. Smith on 4/12/2026” into “[patient_name], [age][gender], occupation: [profession], seen by [provider_name].” AriaMD substitutes the real values at runtime.
Do not over-tokenize. The tokens are for fields that come from the patient record. Everything else is generated from the encounter audio and your prompt.
Step 5: structural levers worth setting explicitly
A few specific structural choices make a template feel like your own. Spell them out in the prompt:
- MSE format. “Render the mental status exam as a single paragraph in prose, not as a bullet list” or vice versa. Stating it removes the most common day-one edit.
- Diagnosis style. “Render diagnoses with ICD-10 codes in parentheses after the diagnostic name. Order primary first.”
- Assessment voice. “Write the assessment in clinical reasoning prose that ties findings to the diagnosis and the plan. Avoid bulleted differential lists unless the case calls for it.”
- Plan structure. “Organize the plan by domain: medications, psychotherapy, monitoring, follow-up, safety. Use short bullet items under each domain.”
- Length. “Total note length should target 1.5 to 2.5 pages of clinical content for a standard 60-minute intake. Trim sections where the patient had little to report.”
These five sentences eliminate most of the structural editing on day one.
Step 6: handle the things every intake needs
Outpatient psychiatric intakes have a small number of elements that always need to appear in the note, regardless of what the patient said. State them in the prompt:
Always include sections for: chief complaint, history of present illness, psychiatric history, medical history, family psychiatric history, social history, substance use history, current medications, allergies, mental status examination, suicide risk assessment with C-SSRS reference, diagnosis, and plan. If the visit did not produce data for a section, mark it explicitly (e.g., “Family psychiatric history: deferred this visit, will obtain at follow-up”) rather than omitting the section.
The marker pattern is more defensible than a missing section. A reviewer looking at the chart sees that the field was considered and addressed, even if the data is incomplete.
Step 7: save, run, and edit one real visit
Save the template. On your next intake, select it as the note format for the encounter. Record the visit as you normally would. When the note generates, read it as you would read a colleague’s note and edit anything that does not match how you actually chart.
The first generated note is rarely perfect. The second is closer. By the third intake on the new template, the edit pass is short, and the parts you are still editing are usually patient-specific content rather than structural patterns.
Step 8: come back and tune
Open the template again after three to five intakes. Look at the diff between what you wrote in the template and what you actually signed off on. The recurring edits are the next round of prompt updates.
Common second-round refinements:
- Adjusting the level of detail in a particular section that was consistently too long or too short.
- Tightening the voice in the assessment if the generated prose is more textbook than clinical.
- Adding a sentence to the prompt that addresses a specific patient population (e.g., “When the patient endorses substance use, generate a brief substance-use review even if not part of the chief complaint”).
- Removing a section that was not actually being used.
Two rounds of tuning is typical. After that the template stabilizes.
When to make a second template instead of forcing one
Do not try to make one template do too much. A single intake template that has to handle adult outpatient, geriatric outpatient, child and adolescent, and addiction medicine is going to do all four poorly. If two visit types have meaningfully different structures, make two templates and pick the right one at the start of the encounter. Templates are cheap; bad notes are not.
A reasonable starting set for a psychiatric practice: adult intake, adult med-management follow-up, child/adolescent intake, child/adolescent follow-up. A therapist might run: intake, DAP follow-up, BIRP follow-up, treatment-plan review. A NP/PA in addiction medicine might run: MAT intake, MAT follow-up, naltrexone visit, buprenorphine induction.
Where Nextvisit fits
The template you build runs on every visit you assign it to. Aria captures the audio, applies the prompt, substitutes the variable tokens, and produces the draft. Custom templates also serve as the prompt body for AI Tasks if you want to run a structured analysis across encounters; same template, different surface.
The 15 minutes spent on the template are the most leveraged minutes in the first month. A template that matches how you actually chart turns the editing pass from rewriting drafts into reviewing them.