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Hello Airtable Team,

 

I hope you’re doing well.

 

I’m currently building a patient management system using Airtable and I need to implement the following key features:

 

  1. A public form where patients can submit a medicine request (already handled via Airtable Forms).
  2. Automatic generation of a username and password after form submission if an email is provided.
  3. An automatic email sent to the patient with their login credentials.
  4. A secure way for patients to log in and view the status of their request via a dashboard.
  5. Role-based access for a committee and union member to review, approve, or reject the requests.
  6. A system to prevent duplicate submissions based on national ID and phone number.
  7. A “Forgot Password” feature to allow patients to recover their login access.

 

 

I understand that Airtable is excellent for data collection and collaboration, but currently lacks native functionality for:

 

  • User logins
  • Status dashboards for external users (with restricted access)
  • Automated workflows like account generation and email delivery

 

 

Could you please confirm:

 

  • Whether these features are on the roadmap?
  • If there is any official way (or integration you recommend) to implement such a workflow entirely within Airtable, or
  •  

 

 

Your guidance would be much appreciated as I’m trying to build this project for a public health initiative on a limited budget.

 

Best regards,

 

Airtable does not lack any of those features.

You can do all of those things with Airtable’s forms, Airtable’s automations, and Airtable’s portals.

You can read more about portals in Airtable’s support article here, which costs $120 per month for 15 users, and $8 per month for each additional customer after that.

If you want to save money, you can turn to 3rd-party portals, which are significantly less expensive than Airtable’s portals. The most popular portals that are currently available for Airtable are: Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.

I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

Also, you can gain more functionality than Airtable’s forms by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to let your customers update their own records using a form. (But if you’re already using portals, then you probably wouldn’t need to let customers update their own records using a form.)

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on this Airtable podcast episode: Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

User logins

Hmm, are you okay with getting your users to create Airtable accounts?  If so, you could potentially get away with getting a Business plan, getting the patients to create Airtable accounts, and inviting them to an Interface where you’ve prevented external collaborators from seeing each other (which is a Business plan feature)

If not, you’d have to use a third party portal for this, and those usually charge by the user.  How many users do you expect to have?  Softr costs 49$ a month for 20 App Users, for example
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Status dashboards for external users (with restricted access)

You could make an Interface for this, and they’d only have access to that Interface and none of the underlying data

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Automated workflows like account generation and email delivery

No to account generation, yes to email delivery.  Most automated flows should be fine and you can always link to third party automation tools like Make to handle stuff too

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Role-based access for a committee and union member to review, approve, or reject the requests.

Doable, if you’re okay with paying for accounts for these people they’d be able to make edits within Airtable.  If budget’s a concern, you could try using Fillout for this which has 1k submissions per month for free

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A system to prevent duplicate submissions based on national ID and phone number.

Airtable doesn’t have anything that prevents submissions I’m afraid, and you’d have to use Fillout for that, but that feature’s under Fillout’s Enterprise plan.  The workaround is usually to allow the submission, but have an automation that’ll check whether its’ a duplicate and then take action from there

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Given that this is a healthcare related thing you may want to look into whether Airtable’s existing security policies fit your needs too I think?

Having external users signup for Airtable business accounts would not be a good idea, because the cost is 5x higher than using Airtable’s portals — and no additional functionality would be gained for paying 5x more.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

The patients are only viewing their statuses via a dashboard so it’d be read-only and free?

That is true — if the users are read-only, then they would be free accounts! So that could work!

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