Creating Your Own AI Summary Templates

Zentake's AI Summary feature reads a patient's completed intake form and rewrites their answers into a clean, formatted note using a template you design. Instead of scrolling through raw form responses, you get a polished summary in your own structure and language — every time a form is submitted.

This article shows you how to write your own templates.

How it works

You write a template once. It's just plain text with a few special markers. When a patient submits their form, the AI:

1. Reads their responses.
2. Fills your template using only what the patient actually answered.
3. Returns the finished note in the exact structure you laid out.

The AI never invents, assumes, or adds anything the patient didn't provide. If an answer is missing, it leaves that spot blank rather than guessing.

The three building blocks

Your template is built from three markers. Each one tells the AI to do something different.

1. [Brackets]  — fill this in

Anything inside square brackets is a placeholder. The AI replaces it with the patient's matching response.

Chief complaint: [chief complaint]

If the patient answered "lower back pain," you get:

Chief complaint: lower back pain

A few rules for placeholders:

• Multiple answers (like a multi-select question) come back comma-separated: Ibuprofen, Aspirin .
• No answer provided? The AI leaves the placeholder empty but keeps your label and structure intact.
• Write the bracket text as a plain description of what you want — [current medications] , [duration of symptoms] , [sleep quality] . It's used to match the right response.

2. (Parentheses)  — private instructions to the AI

Anything inside parentheses is a note to the AI, not content for the patient's chart. It's stripped out of the final summary. Use it to guide how a placeholder gets filled.

Symptom summary: [symptoms] (summarize in one clinical sentence)

The (summarize in one clinical sentence)  never appears in the output — it just shapes how the AI writes that line.

3. "Quotation marks"  — use this exact wording

Anything in quotation marks is treated as a direct quote and reproduced word-for-word. Use it for standard phrasing you want to appear identically every time, or to preserve a patient's exact words.

Patient states: "[patient's own description of pain]"

The AI transcribes what's inside exactly, without paraphrasing.

What the AI will and won't do

Because these summaries go into a clinical record, the feature is deliberately conservative:

• ✅ It uses only the information in the submitted form.
• ✅ It keeps your template's structure, order, and labels exactly as written.
• ✅ It maintains a formal, clinical tone.
• ❌ It will not infer, assume, or add details the patient didn't provide.
• ❌ It will not rearrange your sections or change your wording.

If you want a certain interpretation or grouping, tell it explicitly using a (parentheses)  instruction.

Worked examples

Example 1 — Simple intake header

Template:

Patient: [full name] Age: [age] Reason for visit: [reason for visit]

Output:

Patient: John Doe Age: 45 Reason for visit: Follow-up for anxiety

Example 2 — Behavioral health note with an AI instruction

Template:

HPI: [presenting concerns] (write as a short narrative paragraph in third person) Current medications: [medications] Sleep: [sleep quality over past two weeks]

Output:

HPI: The patient reports increased worry and difficulty concentrating over the past month, along with occasional low mood. Symptoms began after a job change. Current medications: Sertraline, Melatonin Sleep: Poor, averaging four to five hours per night

The (write as a short narrative paragraph…)  instruction shaped the HPI line and then disappeared from the final note.

Example 3 — Multi-select and grid questions

For a checklist question, selected options come back as a comma-separated list:

Template:

Reported symptoms: [symptoms checklist]

Output:

Reported symptoms: Fatigue, Restlessness, Irritability

Grid-style (matrix) questions map cleanly to labeled lines:

Template:

Blood Pressure Readings: - Morning: [morning bp] - Afternoon: [afternoon bp] - Evening: [evening bp]

Output:

Blood Pressure Readings: - Morning: 120/80 - Afternoon: 125/85 - Evening: 118/78

Tips for building good templates

• Label everything. Keep your headers and labels outside the brackets so your note stays readable even when a field is blank.
• Describe the placeholder clearly. [medications the patient currently takes]  matches more reliably than [meds info] .
• Use parentheses to control style, not to add content — for example (list newest first)  or (one sentence, no abbreviations) .
• Reserve quotation marks for fixed phrasing you want verbatim every time.
• Start small. Build a short template, submit a test form, and confirm the output reads the way you want before expanding it.

Quick reference

Once your template looks right, save it and it will run automatically on every matching form submission — giving you a ready-to-read clinical summary without the manual write-up.