In this article, we'll walk through:
- The benefits of Assessments
- Customization options in Workshop
- Additional uses for Assessments
After reading this article, you’ll understand:
- How Assessments add value to your program
- How Assessments are accessed in Coach Portal
- What customization options are available for Assessments
- What other uses Assessments can support
Assessment basics
Assessments are information collection forms. They allow you to standardize the kinds of information your program routinely collects, like a “New Patient Intake Form” or “Patient Health Questionnaire.” You can also add instructions or scripts to Assessments, for coaches to reference when collecting information from patients.
Assessments can also support coaches’ workflows. You can create forms for structured note-taking or checklists.
Once Assessments are published, they’re accessible from the Assessment menu in the Patient Profile. Assessments that can be sent directly to patients are found in the SMS or Email Template they’ve been included in.
Creating Assessments in Workshop
The Assessments feature in Workshop offers a variety of ways to customize each form to meet different needs. You can specify the form’s audience, question and response types, layout, which answers are required, and which answers should trigger their own particular follow-up question, or set of questions.
Additionally, the audience type limits who can see and complete the Assessment.
Choosing the audience for an Assessment
You can select 1 of 2 audience types for each Assessment:
- Coaches
- Coaches and patients
Choosing “Coaches and patients” enables both a coach or patient to complete the Assessment. These Assessments are sent to patients in the form of a unique link to a web page, which is accessible from their computer or mobile device.
Building Assessments
Make it easier for coaches and patients to complete your forms. Create sections to group similar questions together. For every section, you can add a heading, description, and footer. You can also add question fields, as well as scripts and instructions.
Form fields
There are a number of field types available to build your Assessments. A “field type” is the structure of the response to a question. Decide on the information you want to collect and choose the type best suited for that kind of response.
Field types are:
- “Text field”- empty fields for text responses
- “Multiple choice field”- multiple choice menus for single, or multi-select, responses
- “Number field”- fields that require a numeric response, either whole or decimal
- “Date field”- a date-picker field, requiring respondent to select a date from a calendar
There’s also a “Read-only field,” for entering instructions, or other content that’s not questions and responses, to Assessments.
Further customize Assessments fields to be:
- Optional or required
- Conditional (based on how other questions are answered)
Conditional fields
Marking a field as “conditional” allows you to “enable” it or “disable” it on the form, depending on a previous question’s response. You must create the initial question before the conditional field, to be able to define the conditions for that field.
For example: If the initial question asks, “Does this patient smoke?” and is answered “Yes,” then the Assessment will enable a series of follow-up questions based on that response. If the coach selects “No,” the follow-up question fields can’t be responded to in the Assessment.
Coach workflows can also be simplified with conditional questions.
For example: If a coach selects a conditional response while completing a structured notes Assessment, the follow-up fields will be enabled or disabled based on their answer. This saves coaches from spending time scanning or answering irrelevant questions.
Conditional fields ensure:
- Respondent won’t submit responses to questions that aren’t relevant to them
- Conversations feel more natural, because unnecessary questions won’t derail the conversation
- The form stays as brief as possible. Giving people fewer questions to answer means higher completion rates, and more thoughtful responses
Sending Assessments to patients
To send patients Assessment links, the Assessment must be added to a SMS or Email Template in Workshop. Each time the template is used in the Coach Portal, it generates a unique URL for the Assessment specifically associated with that patient. This URL is valid for 30 days, giving the patient 30 days to complete it.
Once successfully completed, the patient receives a confirmation message communicating that the form has been submitted. Timeline events appear in the patient profiles indicating that they’ve completed an Assessment, and can optionally be expanded to view how they’ve responded to each question.
If you’d like to customize the look of your patient-facing Assessments to appear more consistent with your brand, you can do so using the Branding feature in Workshop.
Additional uses for Assessments
Assessments offer other ways to support the kinds of content used by your program.
Structured notes
Creating Assessments for structured note-taking allows you to define what topics coaches should address, ensuring a standardization for the data that’s collected. Use text fields to allow coaches to enter free-form notes in response to the prompts or questions you’ve input in the question field.
Checklists
Use Assessments to build simple checklists. Enter the checklist item as the “question” of a multiple choice field, and create answer options of “Yes” and “No,” or “Done” and “Not done,” to verify completion.
This format works best for checklists used during single patient interactions. If a longer timeline is needed to complete a set of tasks, use a Care Flow instead.
Process conditions
Once Assessments are created, they can be used to automate behavior in your program. To learn how to trigger actions using Assessments and responses, read about Workshop’s Processes feature.
Here are some additional resources: