Patient

A Patient is the person intake is collected from, the record that every Form and Packet submission is linked to. Every Patient belongs to exactly one Team.

Contains PHI

Patient records hold personally identifiable and health-related information, name, date of birth, contact details, and (via linked Responses) medical history and insurance data. Treat Patient data and anything derived from it as PHI in your integration.

Naming

The API, the Zentake dashboard, and this documentation call this resource Patient, the field and endpoint names below are what you'll actually see. Exception: some CSV export column keys (e.g. customer_public_id, customer_first_name) and the CustomerBatchUpload schema title in the API reference still use the legacy customer naming. They refer to the same Patient resource.

Key fields

The full patient record (returned by list, create, retrieve, and update):

Field	Notes
id	Read-only, URL-safe identifier
first_name, middle_name, last_name	middle_name optional
email	Nullable
preferred_contact	Preferred contact method
phone_number, home_phone_number, work_phone_number	Labeled "Mobile", "Home", "Work" in the dashboard
date_birth	Date of birth
sex_at_birth
provider
address, address2, city, state, zipcode
external_id	Read-only, the patient's ID in a linked external system (e.g., an EHR), when synced
external_integration	Read-only, which external system external_id refers to
emergency_contact	Nested object: name, phone, relationship, address
patient_tags	Array of team-defined tags (name, color)
is_anonymous	Read-only, true for patients created from an anonymous/public intake link, before identity is confirmed
custom_fields	Team-defined key/value fields

Wherever a Patient is nested inside another resource (a Response or Message), a lighter shape is used instead: id, first_name, last_name, email, date_birth, external_id.

Lifecycle

1. A Patient is created directly via the API, in the Zentake dashboard, or in bulk via CSV batch upload.
2. Zentake (or your integration) sends the patient a Form or Packet, producing one or more Response / Packet Response records tied to this patient over time.
3. patient_tags and custom_fields can be updated at any point to reflect team-specific workflow state.
4. If the team has an EHR integration configured, external_id / external_integration reflect the corresponding record once linked.

See in API Reference

• Patients, overview
• Get patients · Create patient
• Get patient · Update patient · Partial update patient · Delete patient
• Upload CSV file · Get batch upload status