Once your forms and templates are ready, you can start adding patients and managing their encounters.
Finding an Existing Patient
Before creating a new patient, search the registry to check if a record already exists. Search by health card number or last name + date of birth. For full details on how search works across the Thrive network, see Searching the Patient Registry.
- Click New Encounter from your worklist
- Enter the patient's health card number (province is selectable from a dropdown, defaulting to your clinic's configured province)
- If the patient doesn't have a health card, click "Don't have a health card?" to search by last name + date of birth instead
- Results show the patient's name, formatted date of birth, and masked health card number
Adding a New Patient
The Create New Patient Record option only appears when no matching results are found, helping prevent duplicate records.
- Click Create New Patient Record from the search results screen
- The form will already show the patient's name, date of birth, and health card number from your search
- Complete any additional fields:
- Province and health card number
- Email address (optional, but encouraged so the patient receives notifications when you assign them forms to complete)
- Phone number (optional)
- Click Submit
What happens next: The patient receives an email invitation with a link to create their Thrive account. Once they create their account, they can access any forms you assign to them.
When a patient claims a record you created
If you created a patient record (for example, when an inbound referral arrives) before the patient signed up for Thrive Personal, the patient can later **claim** that record by accepting Thrive's Terms of Use during onboarding. Once they claim it:
- The patient becomes the owner of the record
- They see everything your team contributed (referral documents, intake form responses, extracted data)
- They choose whether to share their personal record back with your clinic
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If they share back, your clinic continues to see new information they add. If they don't, you keep the records you contributed but won't see future updates
You don't need to do anything for the patient to claim — they go through the flow on their side.
Knowing whether a patient is connected
When you open a patient's detail panel, a status pill in the header tells you whether they've connected:
- Patient-linked record — the patient has claimed the record and is sharing back with your clinic; any records they add will appear in their record
- Clinic-only record — no patient has connected yet. The record contains only what your team contributed
Hover the pill for the full description.
Patient Data from Inbound Referrals
When a referral arrives via bulk PDF upload, Thrive's AI extracts patient details from the source document — name, date of birth, address, health card number, and email — and creates a draft patient record. Always confirm these fields before accepting the referral, since they drive downstream triage and may affect duplicate matching.
For bulk referral uploads, the Job List shows every import with the filename, who triggered it, and the result (success, or failure with reason).
For the full referral triage workflow, see Handling Referrals.
Creating Encounters
An encounter is like an "episode of care" or a "visit." Each encounter can have forms assigned to it and tracks the patient's progress.
How to Create an Encounter
- Navigate to your worklist
- Click New Encounter
- Search for the patient by health card number, or by last name + date of birth
- Select the patient from the results
- Click Create Encounter
The system creates the patient record (if new), creates the encounter, and navigates you to the patient details page with the encounter open.
To assign forms, complete forms on behalf of a patient, send reminders, edit submissions, or print — see Assigning Tasks to Patients.
Reviewing Encounters
As patients complete forms, their submissions appear in the related encounter for review.
What You'll See in an Encounter
Click on any patient encounter in the worklist to view:
- Patient details: Name, contact info, and identifiers
- Invitation status: Whether the patient has accepted their invitation
- Active encounter details: Current encounter information
- Completed summaries: AI-generated summaries from form submissions
- Forms and their status: Which forms have been assigned and their completion state
- Activity history: A log of everything that has happened in the encounter
- Other encounters: Links to the patient's other encounters
Importing Many Patients at Once
When you have a stack of patient documents to get into Thrive, import them together instead of creating each patient by hand.
- On the Patient Encounters worklist, click Import
- In the Import patients window, choose an Import mode
- Drop your files onto Drop files here, or click to browse
- Click Done once the upload finishes
Choosing an Import Mode
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Multiple patients | Each file becomes its own patient encounter. Use this for a batch of unrelated documents, such as a set of faxed referrals |
| Single patient | All files attach to a single patient encounter. Use this when you're loading a patient's history from several documents at once |
How Patients Are Matched
Thrive looks for an existing patient using the health number on the document first, falling back to date of birth and last name. When it finds a match, that patient's record is reused. When it doesn't, a new patient and encounter are created.
Encounters appear on your worklist as each file finishes processing, so you can start working before the whole batch is done.
When Some Files Don't Import
If part of an import doesn't succeed, you'll see Some files could not be processed with a link to Jobs. Each file is listed there with the reason it failed, so you can correct it and upload that file again.
Reviewing Encounters
As patients complete forms, their submissions appear in the related encounter for review.
What You'll See in an Encounter
Click any patient encounter in the worklist to open it. Alongside the patient's name, contact information, identifiers, and links to their other encounters, the encounter is organized into these sections:
| Section | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Details | The encounter's date, type, status, and custom fields |
| Attachments | Files added to this encounter |
| Documentation | Clinical documents generated from the encounter |
| Forms | Which forms have been assigned, their completion state, and the summary generated from each |
| Activity Log | A history of everything that has happened in the encounter |
To work inside an encounter, see Adding Files to a Patient Encounter for adding files, Using the Encounter Assistant for asking questions about them, and Generating Clinical Documents for producing notes and letters.
Viewing Form Summaries
When a patient submits a form, a summary is automatically generated if a summary template is configured for that form. The summary sits with the form submission that produced it in the encounter's Forms section, so you go straight from the form to its summary.
For details on setting up summary templates, see Generating Form Summaries.
Regenerating a Form Summary
If you've updated a summary template and want to see the new output:
- Open the encounter
- Open the form summary you want to update
- In the summary's actions menu, click Regenerate