Top 5 FHIR Intake Tools for Pre-Op Screening Workflows

Pre-op screening is a high-stakes intake workflow. The Questionnaire has to cover allergy, anticoagulation, airway, and anesthesia history; the answers feed clinical decisions made hours before incision; and the form has to handle both patient self-administration and clinician-led completion of the same items. The five tools below cover the realistic options for pre-op intake on FHIR in 2026. For broader context, see more on healthcare interoperability.

The 5 FHIR Intake Tools to Know for Pre-Op

LHC-Forms with Pre-Op Profile. The NLM renderer paired with a community pre-op Questionnaire profile that covers the standard ASA-adjacent items. Where it shines is conformance and the zero-license cost; where it falls short is the absence of a managed back end, which surgical centers usually have to provide.

Smile Digital Health Pre-Op Intake. A managed pre-op intake surface built on the Smile CDR, with clinician-facing renderers tuned for the OR holding area workflow. The right answer when the surgical platform is already on Smile.

Open Health Hub Pre-Op Forms. A patient-facing-first option that lets patients complete much of the screening before arrival. Strong fit for ambulatory surgery centers running same-day procedures where patient self-completion reduces holding area time.

Medplum Forms with Pre-Op Bots. A typed Questionnaire implementation with bots that handle the ASA-classification logic and the pre-op clearance routing. Useful for surgical platforms that want custom clearance rules in code.

Firely Forms with .NET Renderers. The .NET-aligned option for surgical platforms anchored on Azure-hosted infrastructure. The right answer for Microsoft-aligned shops with existing investment in Firely-based FHIR persistence.

Pre-op intake tools overlap with multi-site trial research Questionnaire workflows when the surgical program participates in clinical trials, and with tablet-based clinical intake renderers when the holding-area surface runs on tablets. The best SDC form engines for multi-site trial research roundup and the SDC renderers for tablet-based clinical intake roundup cover those adjacent surfaces.

How to Pick the Right Tool

Three questions narrow the field for pre-op intake. The first is the patient-self-completion appetite. Surgical centers that have invested in patient pre-arrival workflows benefit most from the patient-facing-first options. Centers where pre-op screening happens entirely in the holding area can run with the clinician-facing options at a lower implementation cost.

The second is the clearance logic depth. ASA classification, anticoagulation management, and difficult-airway prediction can be encoded as SDC expressions in any conformant tool, but the depth varies. Tools with strong CQL or FHIRPath expression support handle complex clearance rules without forcing the logic into post-submission code.

The third is whether the surgical platform has an existing FHIR footprint. Programs already on Smile, Medplum, Aidbox, or a Firely-backed stack benefit from staying inside that footprint. Greenfield deployments can evaluate the patient-facing and clinician-facing options independently.

A working pre-op intake tool fades into the surgical workflow. The wrong one produces incomplete screening forms at induction, last-minute clearance disputes, and a steady backlog of paper-fallback workflows that defeat the FHIR investment. Selection ends up matching the tool's strengths to the patient-completion strategy, the clearance-logic depth, and the existing platform stack, not to the longest feature checklist on a vendor matrix.