The patient fills it in on the bus. A link arrived by text the minute the booking was confirmed, with your logo and twelve questions. Where does it hurt, how long, what makes it worse, what medication, any surgery, the red-flag questions you insist on asking. Consent and privacy at the end, a finger signature, done in six minutes.
On your side, the answers do not sit in an email you have to copy out. They land in the patient record in Cliniko or Jane, in the fields you already use. If you still work from a paper sheet on a clipboard, the system fills a PDF in your layout and attaches it to the record.
Then it writes one paragraph. Fifty-two, left shoulder, eight weeks, worse overhead, no trauma, takes ibuprofen, had a frozen shoulder on the right in 2019, works at a desk, wants to get back to swimming. That paragraph is in the appointment notes the evening before, and in a 07:30 email with the day's list.
The summary is a summary. It does not diagnose and it does not suggest what to treat. Anything the patient wrote that looks urgent goes to you as written, with the time it came in. The reading and the deciding stay with you.
Forms that are not returned get one reminder the day before, and you can see who has not filled in. The ones who arrive without it do it on a tablet at reception in the same six minutes.
This is the kind of thing we build. It runs in your own accounts, with your questions, in your wording. Which question do you ask at the start of every first appointment that could have been answered on the bus?