Acroforms

Synapse Acroforms

What are Acroforms

Acroforms are PDFs that have been turned into fillable forms.  With respect to Synapse, this means that you can bring up a PDF prefilled with some patient demographics, and physician details to reduce the tedium of filling out third party forms.

Each form will have a submit button which saves the data in the form with the patient records.  Forms previously filled in can be retrieved.

What is required?

You will need Internet Explorer or Firefox with the Acrobat Reader plugin, Synapse Server R84B30 or higher, Synapse Client R215B3 or higher, and a working Physician Web Portal.

Note that Chrome does not work currently.

Why do I need the Physician Web Portal?

The Physician web portal is where the blank Acroforms are stored, and where the Acroforms are processed.  Acroforms need to submit their data to a web server, and the Physician Web Portal serves that purpose.  Without the web portal, you would not be able to see previously filled Acroforms.

What do I need to create the Acroforms?

There are a number of commercial and open source tools that will take a PDF and turn it into an Acroform.  And there are other such tools such as Omniform 5 that can turn a TIFF image and turn that into an Acroform pretty much automatically.  And of course there's always Acrobat Professional 8 and 9.  You will need Acrobat Professional if you wish to add comments dynamically to the form as the Acroform needs to have user rights enabled.

One of the easier to use tools is CutePDF Pro which is about $50.  Be careful though as it creates some field names with spaces in them.  You need to fix them by removing the spaces.

Is there anything special I need to do to my Acroform to work with Synapse?

Yes, you need to create a hidden field, and a submit button

The hidden field has the name "syupdfid", and is set to read only.  ( SYnapse Unique PDF ID ) Synapse will populate this field with a random unique ID and allow the Physician Web Portal to identify to which patient the Acroform belongs.

The "Submit" button is set to visible and non-printing.  It has a value of "submit".  The action for this button is HTML,  and the URL for the action looks like this

    http://www.compkarori.co.nz:8000/md/...chargeForm.pdf

The first part of the URL "http://www.compkarori.co.nz:8000/" should be replaced with the URL of your own Physician Web Portal.  The last part "DischargeForm.pdf" should be replaced with the name of the PDF as it appears in your www/pdfs directory on the Physician Web Portal.

How do I register the Acroform I created with my Physician Web Portal?

1. Copy the Acroform to your www/pdfs directory
2. Login to your portal and then navigate to the new form with your browser eg. http://www.compkarori.co.nz:8000/pdfs/index.rsp
3. Click on the form so that it appears in the Acrobat Reader plugin in your browser
4. Now fill in the form with as many template variables that you can use
5. Submit the form.  This will fail if your session has timed out.  If that happens, don't dispair. Login again with the same browser in a different tab, and then resubmit.
6. Fill in the form that appears with the name of the PDF ( it should already be filled in for you if you have created the URL in the Submit button correctly ), a description, and a class, and then submit the web form.
7. A message that the form has been added should now appear
8. You can edit an existing Acroform from the admin menu.  It will not add another form but just replace the existing definition with the new one that you submit.  Or, you can use the Synapse client Acroforms applet, but make sure that you have an active session by logging in first.

How do I use the Acroform?

In the Synapse client, just click on the Acroforms Applet with a patient active, and select the form you wish to use.  Once you have filled in the other details, you can submit it.  You do not need to login to the Physician Web Portal to submit it.

You also need a setting in Settings/Web Portals to specify where your PDfs are.  So for the demo portal, it is http://www.compkarori.co.nz:8000/pdfs

Videos

Part 1 video - creating an Acroform using Acrobat Professional 9 which shows the other nuances needed to get them working with Synapse.

Part 2 video - some gotchas with Acrobat Pro, and registering the PDF with the Physician Web Portal

Part 3 video - using the just added Acroform with our demo patient

Part 4 video- using the new Acroform with the Synapse Client

Part 5 video - using an Acroform with Synapse Client.