What to bring to a new doctor appointment

For a first visit with a new doctor, bring a photo ID, your insurance card, every medicine you take (a written list, or the bottles), your allergies, your conditions and past surgeries, family history, and a few dated lines on why you're coming. Records from your old doctor help, and the new clinic can tell you how to get them.

This is for an adult or a parent booking for a child. It can't tell you what your clinic requires, so call and ask. It isn't medical advice.

Example: one page for a first visit

Say you booked the appointment three weeks ago. This morning the clinic's form arrives with a box that says "List all current medications," and you are standing in the kitchen trying to remember whether the allergy pill is 5 or 10 milligrams. Below is the page that would have saved you that minute, filled in for an invented eight-year-old.

This is an example. The child and every detail are made up.

Notice what is not on it: the doctor's own name, the insurance number, the vaccine dates. Those belong on a separate sheet, because a new clinic asks for them at a different moment, usually at the front desk rather than in the exam room.

Gather it in this order

Do this the week before, not the night before.

1. Call the clinic and ask two things: what to bring, and whether new-patient forms come ahead of time. Some clinics send them by email or through a portal, and filling them in at home beats a clipboard in the waiting room.
2. Write the medicine list from the labels, not from memory. Name, dose and how often, exactly as printed. Include the ones you don't think of as medicine: over-the-counter pills, vitamins, supplements and herbal products. The medication list guide shows the layout.
3. Put the bottles in a bag as well. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's advice is to bring all your medicines, prescription and non-prescription, to the appointment. We'd bring the list and the bottles, and if they disagree, show the bottle.
4. Write allergies with what happens, in your words: "peanuts, hives" says more than "nut allergy."
5. List conditions and past surgeries or hospital stays with the year. Roughly right is fine. Family history goes below it, as far as you know it.
6. Add the reason for the visit and any symptom with the date it started. If it's a symptom visit, symptom notes for a doctor visit has a four-line format.
7. Ask your old office how to transfer records and vaccine history, and start that now. See the next section.
8. Pack photo ID and your insurance card, and read the clinic's paperwork when it arrives instead of relying on this page.

Records from the old doctor

A written summary can't hold a lab result, a scan or a discharge paper. If your new doctor will want those, they come from the office or hospital that made them. Ask that office how it sends records to a new clinic. Many want a signed release, and some take days or longer, which is why the request belongs in week one.

For a child, vaccine history is the record clinics and schools ask for most. If you don't have it, your old clinic is the first place to ask. Write on your page where the record came from and the date.

A schedule that works backwards from the visit

1. A week before

   Call the clinic. Ask what to bring and whether forms come first.

2. Six days before

   Ask the old office how to send records. Start the release if one is needed.

3. Three days before

   Write the medicine list from the labels. Add allergies and conditions.

4. The night before

   Print the page. Put it, the bottles, ID and insurance card in one bag.

5. At the desk

   Hand over the page. Ask them to check it against their form.

6. After the visit

   Fix anything the doctor changed, and date the page.

What can go wrong

• The page and the clinic's form disagree. The clinic's form is the record they keep, so fix your page to match what you actually take, and tell the front desk.
• Several doctors are involved. A summary of your health doesn't list them, so keep a separate line with each doctor's name, phone number and why you see them.
• You're going for a parent. Bring the same things, plus whatever permission their clinic wants before it talks to you. Caring for a parent and kids in one place covers that part.
• The page is old. A list that was right in March is a guess in September. Write "checked" and the date at the top each time.

Questions people ask

Where the Family Health Binder fits

Family Health Binder keeps the answers this page needs for each person, and its Intake summary prints them for a new doctor: allergies, current medicines, conditions, family history and the latest symptoms, with the person's name and birth date at the top. Doctors, dentists, pharmacies and insurance are kept too, but they print on its separate Forms sheet, not on the Intake summary. It only holds what you type in, it doesn't hold records or scans, and it doesn't fill in the clinic's own form. You can mark a record private so it stays off the printed page, and the page says how many it left off.