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Version: 3.0

Response Template

A response template is a saved starting point for filling out a questionnaire. It bundles pre-filled answers, draft medication orders, and standing procedure requests that a clinician can drop into a patient's record instead of typing everything from scratch — a "favourite" or order set: the work you do once, ready to reuse on the next similar patient.

What it represents​

A response template is a Care-specific authoring convenience, not a FHIR resource. The key thing to understand is that it is a recipe, not a record. Nothing in a template touches a patient until a clinician applies it and submits the resulting questionnaire response — only then are real orders, requests, and observations created. Editing or deleting a template never changes responses already submitted from it.

This separation is what makes templates safe to standardise and tweak: a department can revise its admission order set without disturbing a single chart.

What a template can carry​

A template bundles up to three kinds of content, and any of them may be empty:

  • Questionnaire answers — default values for the linked questionnaire's questions, so a form opens partly (or fully) completed
  • Medication requests — draft prescriptions, each optionally pointing at a known product, that become real orders once applied
  • Activity definitions — pre-built procedure or service requests (labs, imaging, procedures) the template fires off when used

Care keeps a running list of which of these sections a template actually contains, so a client can tell at a glance what applying it will do — without opening the template up.

How it connects​

A response template sits alongside the form tooling rather than inside a single patient's chart:

  • It optionally targets one questionnaire — the form it knows how to pre-fill. A template with no questionnaire is a free-standing bundle of orders.
  • Applying it produces a questionnaire response, which is what actually lands in the patient's record.
  • Its draft orders reference the same primitives a clinician would create by hand — medication requests and the products behind them, and activity definitions that drive service requests.

Sharing and ownership​

A template is offered to people by scope rather than owned by one author:

  • Facility-wide — tied to a facility so everyone working there can reach it
  • Organization — narrowed to specific facility organizations within that facility
  • Individual users — shared directly with named users
  • Instance-wide — left unscoped to a facility, making it available across the deployment

Because sharing is by facility, organization, or user, the same template can be a personal shortcut for one doctor or a standardised order set for an entire department.

Permissions​

Reading and listing response templates is not gated by a permission slug — the API instead scopes results to templates a user can already reach: those they created, those shared directly with them, and those shared with a facility organization they belong to. Creating, updating, and deleting a template all require a single write permission.

PermissionDescriptionSystem Roles
can_write_questionnaire_response_templateCreate, update, and delete response templates (including their sharing scope)Admin, Doctor, Nurse, Administrator, Staff, Facility Admin, Volunteer, Pharmacist

Roles are granted through a user's facility and organization memberships, and permissions cascade down the organization tree — so a user's reach over templates follows wherever those memberships place them.