Google Forms can collect intake and consent cleanly and route every response into a private Drive folder. Here's how to build it well — and the intake-to-chart gap a Form can never close on its own.
Published August 2026 · Written by Perry Emerick, LPC · 6 min read
Plenty of solo therapists collect intake through a paid platform's built-in forms and never think about it. But if you already live in Google Workspace, Google Forms is a perfectly reasonable place to gather a client's history, contact details, and consent — as long as two things are true first. You're on a paid Workspace plan with a signed Business Associate Agreement with Google, and Forms is one of the services that agreement covers in your configuration. A free consumer Google account has no BAA and cannot hold protected health information, full stop.
Assuming that foundation is in place, the design of the form itself is where most of the care goes. Not because Forms is hard, but because an intake form is often the first protected information a new client hands you, and how you handle it sets the tone.
A workable adult intake form covers the practical and the clinical without turning into a novel. I keep mine to sections a client can finish in ten minutes:
That consent question is the one I want to slow down on. Somewhere in the form you should have a required item that reads something like: "I have received and reviewed the practice's informed consent and privacy documents, and I consent to begin services." Make it a required multiple-choice with a single "Yes, I acknowledge" option, so the form can't be submitted without it. That timestamped response becomes part of your record that consent was obtained before the first session.
A note on scope: a checkbox in a Form documents that a client acknowledged your consent materials. It is not a substitute for the materials themselves, and for some documents an acknowledgment is exactly right while a wet or e-signature is more appropriate for others. Match the mechanism to the document.
By default, Google Forms collects responses inside the form and can drop them into a linked Google Sheet. For a therapy practice, the important discipline is that the response Sheet — and any file uploads — live inside a private Drive folder that only you can access, ideally the same client-folder structure you use for everything else, never shared, never in a "Shared with me" gray zone.
If you haven't set up your client-folder structure yet, that's worth doing first — it's what gives these responses a proper home. I wrote a full walkthrough of that hierarchy and naming convention in a companion piece, linked below.
Here's the part the tidy tutorials skip. A Google Form gets you a beautifully organized pile of responses. It does not get you a clinical record. Between the two sits a person — you — who still has to read the intake, pull the meaningful pieces into the client's chart, score any assessments by hand, and file the result where your progress notes live.
Every screener a client fills out — a PHQ-9, a GAD-7 — comes back as a row of numbers you then have to add up, interpret, and transcribe into the chart before it means anything clinically. Multiply that by every new client and it becomes its own quiet backlog.
Practice Pad's Cloud tier can help close the scoring half of that gap: with your own Workspace connected, it can pull a client's responses to the standard screeners — a PHQ-9, a GAD-7 — do the scoring math on your device, and file the result into the client's chart, so the score becomes charted information instead of a Sheet you keep meaning to get to. Your intake form itself stays yours — you send it and read it — and nothing about it routes through our servers.
You can absolutely do all of that by hand, and many good clinicians do. But if the screener scoring is where things pile up, it's worth knowing that half can be automated without giving up the Google-native setup you've built.
Keep your Google Forms intake. Let Practice Pad score the standard screeners and file the results into your clients' charts.
iPad app · On-device processing · US & Canada
The folder hierarchy and naming convention that gives your intake responses a proper home.
ComplianceThe agreement and settings that make collecting intake in Forms defensible in the first place.
Part of our series on running a HIPAA-aware practice on Google Workspace. Start with the pillar guide: Google Workspace as a Therapy EHR — and the missing piece.