The 13-step Intake
Every doctor, hospital, social worker, and care manager asks the same questions in different orders. Whether you're caring for a parent, a spouse, an adult child with complex needs, or a sibling, Kintaria captures the answers once — including the ones nobody else asks about — so you stop reciting from memory at every desk. And every answer wires into the rest of the workspace.
The problem of repeated questions
If you've set up a single new healthcare relationship for the person you care for — a mother starting with a new cardiologist, a husband transferring to a new neurology practice after a stroke, an adult daughter with cerebral palsy seeing a new orthopedist, a sister whose oncology care just moved to a new hospital — you know the pattern. A clipboard. Three pages of forms. The same demographic information you've typed into nine other clipboards in the last six months. The same allergies list. The same primary care doctor's name spelled the same wrong way for the seventh time.
Multiply that across a dozen specialists, a hospital admission, two care transitions, an insurance change, and the parade of social workers, case managers, and home health agencies that arrive after the first major event. The form-filling becomes a part-time job. The information itself isn't hard to recite — but you have to recite it eleven times to eleven different intake staff who all need slightly different versions of the same thing.
Eventually you stop being able to remember it accurately. Was the cardiologist Dr. Patel or Dr. Patelka? Was the AFib diagnosis 2019 or 2020? Did the neurologist add a second seizure medication or just adjust the first one? Was the special-needs trust set up in 2014 or 2015? The answers used to be in your head; now they're in nine partially-filled intake forms scattered across nine filing systems you don't have access to.
The 13 steps — and the features each one feeds
The 13-step intake captures everything every doctor, hospital, social worker, and care manager will ever ask about your loved one — in one place, organized the way they ask. Every answer also wires into a feature elsewhere in the workspace so the information you typed once does work in five other places.
Step 1 — Demographics. Legal name, date of birth, sex at birth, gender identity, pronouns, preferred language, marital status, race/ethnicity (for clinically-relevant screenings). The preferred-language answer is what powers the Bilingual workspace — every note from this point forward appears side-by-side in English and the language your loved one reads most easily. This matters especially in multilingual households where the person you care for reads in Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, or Japanese while you read in English. The original is always preserved as the record.
Step 2 — Living situation. Address, phone, who they live with, level of care (independent / assisted / memory care / group home / shared with you / etc.). The "who else lives with" question is the first hook into Family members + roles — the people in the workspace get assigned as Owner, Caregiver, Observer, or Parent based on how they actually share the care, not on who happened to set up the account. For a spouse caregiver, this is usually you and your partner. For a parent of an adult child with complex needs, it may include a sibling who will someday take over. For a sibling caregiver, it may include a group home coordinator or supported living staff.
Step 3 — Primary care + pharmacy. Who manages overall care, where prescriptions get filled. The PCP becomes the default attendee on appointments added to the Shared calendar; the pharmacy is the default for refills surfaced in Medication review. For someone with a developmental disability, the PCP may be a specialty practice that takes adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities — Kintaria surfaces that as a flag in Suggested next steps if you're looking for a new one.
Step 4 — Insurance and benefits. Medicare, Medicaid, dual eligible, private, Medigap, Advantage plan details — plus the benefits paperwork that matters for the specific situation. For an aging parent: Medicare Advantage plan documents. For a younger spouse: ACA marketplace plan, employer coverage, or COBRA paperwork. For an adult child with complex needs: state Medicaid HCBS waiver approval, SSI/SSDI award letters, ABLE account documentation, special-needs trust paperwork, the state DDS or DDA service plan. For a sibling caring for an adult with a lifelong disability: the same waivers and trusts, often inherited from a parent. Every card, every approval letter, every plan summary lands in the Document vault, encrypted at rest, OCR-searchable, and reachable in three taps from any phone screen. The plan and benefits details give you the context for navigating the Resource directory — the curated library of home health agencies, transportation programs, food benefits, and state-specific support organizations — so you can find the ones the coverage actually pays for without scrolling past the wrong category.
Step 5 — Conditions, allergies, recent hospitalizations. The high-priority history. For an aging parent, this is often hypertension, atrial fibrillation, diabetes, and the cataract surgery from 2019. For a spouse caregiver, it's often the condition that reshaped the marriage — a stroke, MS, Parkinson's, a cancer diagnosis, early-onset Alzheimer's. For a parent of an adult child with complex needs, it's a decades-long history with named diagnoses (cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism with co-occurring epilepsy, intellectual disability) plus every hospitalization and procedure since birth. For a sibling caregiver, the picture depends on the underlying situation. Every condition becomes a row in the Medical history with lab trends view — when a new lab comes in, you see the trajectory rather than a single value. The allergy list anchors the top of every One-page summary so the next ER intake nurse sees it before anything else. The hospitalization list seeds the Step-by-step playbooks with the right context.
Step 6 — Activities of daily living. Bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring, eating, continence — independence level for each. These answers feed the Suggested next steps module, which nudges the highest-leverage thing to do this week based on what's drifting. For an aging parent, a recent decline in toileting independence surfaces the question of whether home health hours are enough. For an adult child with complex needs, the ADL profile is often the baseline that's been stable for years — the workspace flags any change from that baseline, not generic decline.
Step 7 — Instrumental activities of daily living. Phone use, shopping, cooking, finances, medications, transportation, fall history. The medication-management answer becomes a flag in Medication review — if your loved one is no longer managing meds independently (or never has), the workspace surfaces the daily-or-weekly fill workflow as the default. Fall history routes into the "After a fall" playbook for older adults and the relevant orthopedic or PT follow-up surfaces in Suggested next steps.
Step 8 — Cognition + social network. Memory concerns, dementia diagnosis (formal or working), or — for someone with a lifelong cognitive disability — baseline cognitive profile and any recent change from it. Who else is in the care circle. For aging parents and spouses with new cognitive changes, the cognition answer determines whether the New dementia diagnosis playbook becomes available. For an adult son or daughter with intellectual disability, the answer is the baseline that's been there a long time, and the workspace uses it to surface the right communication tools and the right specialty-care suggestions. The social network names get pre-populated as invite suggestions for Family members + roles, with the consent basis defaulting to the role each person plays.
Step 9 — Day-to-day stability (social determinants of health). Food security, housing stability, transportation access, social isolation, financial strain, digital access. These are the questions that predict hospital readmission better than most clinical signs, and most generic intake forms skip them entirely. Kintaria captures them because they belong in the workspace — and because the Resource directory has curated entries for the relevant programs (Meals on Wheels and SNAP enrollment help by category, the Eldercare Locator to reach your local Area Agency on Aging for respite vouchers, the state DD agency for day programs and supported employment) ready to reference when an answer points at a gap.
Step 10 — Nutrition. Diet restrictions, appetite changes, weight changes, swallowing concerns, who prepares meals. Weight changes specifically join the Medical history with lab trends longitudinal view so the slow drift is visible. Swallowing concerns flag relevant Plain-language visit summaries with a follow-up reminder — important for any patient with stroke history, advanced dementia, MS, ALS, or developmental disabilities affecting oral-motor function.
Step 11 — Home safety. Fall hazards, smoke and CO detectors, stove safety, medical alert device, mobility-related safety (driving, where applicable; wheelchair clearance and home accessibility where relevant), firearms in the home. Driving applies for some — aging parents, spouses, adult children who drove before the change — and not for others. When it does apply, the answer is the one that surfaces "The car keys conversation" essay in the workspace at the right moment. The firearms question feeds into the New dementia diagnosis playbook for older adults and into safety planning for anyone with a relevant mental-health history. The medical alert answer informs whether the "After a fall" playbook recommends one.
Step 12 — Advance care planning + legal authority. Healthcare POA, financial POA, advance directive, DNR/POLST/MOLST status, end-of-life preferences. For caregivers of an adult with cognitive impairment that predates adulthood (an adult son with intellectual disability, a brother with a developmental disability), this step is also where guardianship orders, conservatorship paperwork, or supported decision-making agreements live. For spouses, the joint POA setup is recorded — and the workspace knows that you and your partner are co-decision-makers by default. For sibling caregivers, the consent basis question is especially important because the medical and legal system assumes next-of-kin is a parent or spouse, not a sibling — having the authority documented up front prevents the "but you're just her sister, ma'am" conversation at the ER desk. Every status here updates Consent basis on every member, so when someone shows up to a new specialist, the workspace audit log already names the legal basis for their authority. The end-of-life preferences live at the top of the One-page summary for the ER.
Step 13 — Documents. Upload the insurance and benefits cards (already taken in step 4), the Medicare card, the POA documents, the advance directives, recent labs, the medication list from the last hospital discharge. For an adult child with complex needs: IEPs from school years, transition plans from age 14 onward, the state waiver application and approval, the special-needs trust documents, ABLE account paperwork, guardianship orders, the day-program service plan. For a sibling caregiver who inherited these from a parent: the same paperwork plus the parent's letter of intent. Smart upload reads each document on arrival — it classifies the type, extracts the dates and the relevant fields, and files it where it belongs. A discharge summary becomes a hospitalization entry. A lab report becomes a row in Medical history with lab trends. A POA becomes a status flag in Consent basis for whoever is named. An IEP becomes part of the educational/transition record. A trust document becomes part of the legal scaffolding.
Every step is skippable. Every step can be returned to. The whole thing takes about 15 minutes if you fill in everything, or 3 minutes if you only fill in the basics. There's a Back button on every step so you can edit something three screens back without losing the rest.
What the intake then makes possible
The 13 steps are the foundation. The features below are what the foundation lets the workspace do.
Plain-language visit summaries. Paste in what the doctor said or dictate it on the way to the car, and Kintaria drafts three sentences a non-medical sibling can understand, plus the question worth asking next time. Because the intake already knows your loved one's conditions, the summary flags anything that conflicts with the existing care plan.
Voice line. Call (888) 704-0999 from your registered phone and dictate a note hands-free — for walking back to the car after an appointment, or the kitchen at 11 PM after the hospital called. The dictation routes into the right workspace section based on context.
Apple Health import. Pull a year of heart rate, blood pressure, weight, and walking steadiness from your loved one's iPhone Health app. The data joins Medical history with lab trends so the metrics from the watch on a wrist are charted alongside the labs from the cardiologist.
Share with a provider. A new specialist needs the relevant history — not all of it, just the slice that matters. Generate a scoped, expiring read-only link with exactly what they should see. They open it in a browser, no signup, no friction. When the appointment is over, the link auto-expires. Particularly useful for adult children of immigrant parents handing off context to a new doctor, parents of adult children with complex needs introducing a new specialist to a decades-long history, or sibling caregivers establishing authority with a new clinic.
One-page summary. A print-ready PDF for the ER, the new doctor, or the cardiologist who hasn't seen the chart yet. Pulled from the intake answers, kept current as anything changes. Folds into a wallet.
Activity feed. Every change to the workspace is logged with name and consent basis — who edited what, when, and with what authority. When a question comes up six months from now about who decided to switch the medication, the answer is in the log rather than in someone's memory of a phone call.
Built for health data. The whole workspace is encrypted at rest and in transit, with a full audit trail. Private by default — your family's data stays inside your family's workspace, never used to train AI, never sold. Two-step sign-in protects every owner account with text codes or an authenticator app plus recovery codes. Export lets you download a full JSON + Markdown archive any time, with the original documents indexed alongside; workspace deletion is one email request away today (a self-service delete button is on the near-term roadmap). For caregivers planning succession — usually parents of an adult child with complex needs thinking about who takes over someday — the export is also the handoff: a sibling can import the workspace and have everything the original caregiver knew, intact.
Why this works (when blank forms don't)
The 13 steps aren't arbitrary. They're the union of: every standard intake form used by major U.S. health systems, every social-determinants-of-health screening used by Medicare ACOs, every comprehensive geriatric assessment template, the IDEA-mandated transition plan elements for adults aging out of school-based services, and the questions that come up in every real-world hospital discharge planning conversation.
The point isn't to make you fill out forms more. It's to fill them out once — so the next time anyone asks any of these questions, you have an answer ready in seconds. The One-page summary and Share with a provider features pull the relevant subset into a format the next provider can actually use.
The questions nobody else asks about
A few categories of intake question rarely make it onto generic forms but matter enormously when they come up:
- Food and housing security. Hospitals are starting to screen for these because they predict readmission better than most clinical signs. Kintaria captures them because the home health nurse who shows up next week needs to know whether the fridge has food in it — and so the family can navigate straight to the relevant entries in the Resource directory (Meals on Wheels, SNAP, the local Area Agency on Aging) when an answer points at a gap.
- Firearms in the home. Critical for any patient with dementia or suicidal ideation, but generic intake forms don't ask. We do — and the answer flags the relevant secure-storage conversation in the New dementia diagnosis playbook.
- Guardianship, conservatorship, supported decision-making. For anyone over 18 with cognitive impairment — whether lifelong or acquired — the legal authority question is the one the medical system assumes is settled and almost never verifies. Consent basis on every member turns the legal answer into documented authority anyone with workspace access can see.
- Succession planning. For parents of adult children with complex needs — and for siblings who may someday take over — the question of who picks this up next doesn't appear on any clinical intake form. Kintaria captures it as part of the workspace: who has been added as Owner-in-waiting, what they have access to, what documents they'll inherit.
- Preferred language. Often missing from intake forms in clinics that don't routinely serve non-English-speaking families. The Bilingual workspace uses the answer to make sure the person you care for reads everything in their language while you read it in yours — same record, no translation tax.
Why this matters
The unglamorous part of caregiving is the intake forms. The transitions of care, the new specialists, the home health agency that needs everything in writing before they can send anyone out. Most of caregiving's administrative load lives in those repeated questions.
Kintaria's intake doesn't eliminate the forms. It eliminates having to know the answers by heart. You answer the question once and Kintaria keeps the answer ready for the next time someone asks. After the first time you fill it out, every subsequent intake is twenty seconds with your phone open, not twenty minutes with a clipboard. And because each answer wires into the rest of the workspace, the intake isn't just a record — it's the foundation everything else in Kintaria uses to be useful in the right moment, for whichever loved one you happen to be caring for.
The point isn't to make you fill out forms more. It's to fill them out once — so the next time anyone asks, you have an answer ready in seconds. And every answer does work in five other places.