Key concepts

EVAL uses specific terminology throughout the platform and this documentation. Understanding these concepts before you start working makes everything else easier to follow. This page defines each term once — other pages link back here rather than re-explaining them.

The concepts are grouped by how you encounter them: building evaluations, managing patients, and sharing your work.

Building evaluations

These are the concepts you encounter when creating clinical assessment tools in the Builder.

Evaluation is the core unit you build in EVAL — an interactive clinical tool that collects patient data through questions and produces results through scoring logic. An evaluation might be a depression screening instrument, a surgical risk calculator, a patient intake form, or any other structured clinical workflow. You build evaluations in the Builder and deploy them to patients through your Library.

Section is a grouping of questions within an evaluation. Sections organize your content into logical parts — for example, a pre-operative assessment might have sections for medical history, current medications, and surgical risk factors. Each section can have its own title and description, and you can control which sections appear using visibility rules.

Question is a data input within a section. EVAL supports several question types: number inputs, single-choice selections, multiple-choice selections, text fields, date/time pickers, and signature captures. Each question can be required or optional, and you can attach visibility rules to show or hide questions based on earlier responses.

Result is the output of an evaluation — the clinical information displayed to the patient or practitioner after questions are answered. Results come in two types: formula results calculate a score or classification from question inputs (like a PHQ-9 total score), and information results display static or conditional text (like clinical recommendations based on score ranges).

Formula is a spreadsheet-style expression that calculates a result from question inputs. Formulas can reference question values, perform arithmetic, use conditional logic (IF/THEN), and call built-in functions. You write formulas in the Formula Editor, which provides autocomplete and validation. See Results for details.

Visibility rule is a condition that controls whether a section, question, or result appears during an evaluation. Visibility rules let you create branching logic — for example, showing a follow-up question only when the patient selects a specific answer, or displaying a result only when a score exceeds a threshold. See Visibility rules.

Revision is a versioned snapshot of an evaluation. Every time you publish changes to an evaluation, EVAL creates a new revision. Previous revisions are preserved, so you can review the history of changes and understand which version of an evaluation was used for any given patient result. See Revisions.

Managing patients

These are the concepts you encounter when working with patient data, clinical workflows, and assessment delivery.

Patient is a clinical record representing a real person (or a simulated test record). Each patient has an identity with demographics, a medical profile, and a chart containing all their evaluation results. You create and manage patients from the Patients page or within patient charts.

Chart is the patient record workspace — the place where you view a patient's full history, run evaluations, and manage their clinical data. A chart has tabs for identity information, medical data, evaluation results, and portal connections. See Patient charts.

Care Panel is a curated group of patients with shared management workflows. Care Panels are where clinical teams spend most of their time — triaging results, tracking outcomes, and coordinating care across a patient population. A panel can represent a clinic program, a research cohort, a care team's caseload, or any grouping that makes sense for your workflow. See Care Panels.

Schedule is a recurring or one-time assignment that delivers an evaluation to a patient on a defined timeline. Schedules specify which evaluation to send, how often, through which channel (email, text message, or patient portal), and for how long. See Scheduling assessments.

Intake is an evaluation delivered through a public link that doesn't require a patient account. Intakes are useful for initial patient enrollment, anonymous screening, or collecting data from people who aren't yet in your system. Respondents complete the evaluation through a shareable URL, and their responses can be matched to existing patient records or create new ones. See Collecting responses with public intakes.

Sharing and discovering evaluations

These concepts relate to how evaluations move between your personal workspace and the broader EVAL community.

Library is your workspace for evaluations. EVAL has two library views: your Private Library contains evaluations you own or have been given access to, and the Shared Library contains evaluations available to everyone in your organization. See Library.

Marketplace is the public catalog where organizations share evaluations with the broader EVAL community. You can browse validated clinical instruments, preview them, and add them to your library. If you've built evaluations that could benefit others, you can publish them to the Marketplace after a review process. See Marketplace.

Collection is a curated group of Marketplace evaluations organized around a theme or specialty — for example, "Mental Health Essentials" or "Surgical Outcomes." Collections help you discover related evaluations without searching for each one individually.

Attribution is the credit assigned to an evaluation's original authors. When you publish to the Marketplace, your organization and any listed authors are credited. When others use your evaluation, that attribution is preserved.

Roles and permissions

Security role determines what areas of EVAL you can access. There are three roles: Account Administrator (full access including billing), Account Maintenance (configuration access without billing), and Account User (clinical features only, no configuration access). Roles are assigned by your organization's administrator. See Roles and permissions.

Sharing permissions on evaluations and Care Panels control who can view, edit, or manage specific items. These are separate from security roles — an Account User might have edit access to one Care Panel and view-only access to another. See Panel visibility and Panel roles for Care Panels or Permissions for evaluations.

What to read next

Now that you know the vocabulary, explore how the platform is organized in Navigating EVAL, or jump directly to the feature area that matches your goal from the documentation home page.