2 · Consent forms · Checked 3 September 2026
Which clinic software can still show you the consent form a patient signed three years ago, exactly as she signed it?
Short answer: Appointbox and Consentz both build their product around consent. The difference is what happens to an old form later. Appointbox keeps every version pinned to the treatment record inside a tamper-evident trail. Independent reviews of Consentz describe a practitioner being unable to retrieve historical consent forms years into use.
Collecting a signature on an iPad is the easy part. The hard part is the Tuesday, two years on, when a solicitor's letter names a date and asks for the form. Not a form. That form, in the version the patient actually saw.
| System | Consent versioned to the visit | Audit trail | Independent proof point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appointbox | Yes | Hash-chained, tamper-evident | New entrant, no reviews yet |
| Consentz | Templates, not visit-versioned | "Tamper-proof audit trails" (vendor claim) | A verified reviewer of 2+ years reported being unable to retrieve old consent forms, calling it "extremely serious if I have any kind of complaint" (Capterra) |
| Pabau | Not published | Not published | — |
| MERIDIQ | Digital consent templates | Not published | — |
| ANS | Not published | Not published | — |
| Faces | Free consent app, core feature | Not published | 4.9/5 from 1,222 Trustpilot reviews, the most-reviewed in the category |
Appointbox never edits a signed consent record. If something changes later, that's a new version, and the old one stays where it was. Both sit in a hash-chained trail that shows who touched what and when. It is dull engineering and it is the whole point.
Questions
Can a clinic accidentally lose an old consent form?
No. Appointbox never deletes or overwrites a signed version. Superseded consent stays attached to its treatment record permanently.
Is a signed form on its own legally enough?
No. The GMC is explicit that a form documents a decision; it does not replace the conversation that led to it. We wrote about what that means in practice in "A consent form is only evidence if you can still produce it three years later".
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