No two medicolegal offices collect exactly the same information. A rural coroner's office may not need a full histology section. A large urban ME office may require tribal affiliation and military discharge date on every case. Zeph's field-level configuration system lets administrators shape the case module to match how their office actually works — without writing a single line of code.
Two Levels of Control
Zeph gives administrators control at two levels of granularity:
- Section-level: Show or hide entire sections within a tab (e.g., hide the Military Service section entirely if your office doesn't collect it).
- Field-level: For individual fields within a visible section, mark a field as hidden (not shown to users) or required (must be filled before the case can advance).
Both levels are configured through the Case Template Editor in the admin panel — a point-and-click interface that shows every available tab, section, and field, along with its current visibility and requirement state.
What Can Be Configured
The field catalog covers all 25 substantive case-detail tabs, with over 200 named field keys organized into 25 groups. A few highlights:
Demographics Tab — 34 Fields
Every demographic field is individually configurable: ward-of-state status, inmate flag, housing status, home address (all sub-fields), ethnicity, birthplace, birth country, SSN, marital status, spouse name, occupation, employer, industry, education level, military service fields, religion, primary language, tribal affiliation, usual residence, parent names, and informant contact details.
An office that serves a tribal community can make tribal affiliation required; an office that never collects religion can hide that field entirely. Both offices share the same software — only the configuration differs.
Scene Tab — 34 Fields
Scene investigation fields — location type, address, position of body, scene conditions, witness information, and photography fields — are all independently configurable for both the edit form and the read-only display view.
Autopsy Tab — 16 Fields
Both the schedule form and the completion form have independently configurable fields. An office that always schedules autopsies (and doesn't need a scheduling form) can hide the schedule section while keeping the completion form fully visible.
Next of Kin, Decedent Panel, and More
The NOK add form has 8 configurable fields; the Decedent Panel header has 9. The catalog continues across Intake, Toxicology, Death Certificate, Evidence, Chain of Custody, Cremation, Lab Orders, and Property tabs.
How It Works Under the Hood
The Case Template Editor saves a per-office template to the database. When a case
tab loads, a useCaseConfig hook fetches the template for the current
office and exposes a df() helper function. Each field calls
df('field.key') to get its visibility and required state — then
renders conditionally. If a template has no entry for a field, the field defaults
to visible and optional, preserving backward compatibility with offices that haven't
configured a template yet.
This design means new fields added in future releases are automatically visible to all offices until explicitly configured — no migration step required for existing deployments.
Template Versioning
Every template has a version number. When new sections or fields are added in a
software update, the system runs a migrateTemplateSections() pass at
startup that appends any new sections to existing templates, preserving all
existing configuration. Offices never lose their customizations during an upgrade.
The Admin Experience
From the admin panel, the workflow looks like this:
- Open Admin → Case Template Editor
- Browse the tab and section hierarchy
- Expand any section to see its individual fields
- Toggle "Hidden" or "Required" for each field
- Click Save — changes take effect immediately for all users in the office
No restart required. No developer ticket. No waiting for the next release cycle.
Why This Matters
Every unnecessary field on a form is friction for the examiner filling it in. Every missing required field is a data quality gap that surfaces during audits or EDRS submission. Field-level configuration is how Zeph makes both problems solvable by the people who understand the office's workflows — administrators and chief medical examiners — rather than by the software vendor.
If you'd like to see the Case Template Editor in action, our demo environment includes a full working copy of the admin panel.