With patients’ number one complaint being ‘long wait times’, let’s take a look at how your healthcare organization can use digital intake forms to beat this trend and positively impact your patients’ experience.
1. Faster patient intake process
Patient intake is essential, but it can often be an inefficient process.
Frustrating delays in patient intake and long wait times often arise from having to fill in paperwork on arrival, including medical history questionnaires, patient registration, consent forms, and insurance documents.
Investing in digital intake forms, that allow patients to complete all paperwork (on a device of their choosing) before they arrive for an appointment, means that your healthcare administration team can quickly and efficiently update records, process new patients and insurance changes, etc.
This helps ensure a speedy patient intake process and boosts patient satisfaction.
2. Optimized patient flow
Optimizing patient flow is crucial for healthcare facilities, not only to increase revenue but also to increase patient satisfaction and safety.
The check-in process is often a significant bottleneck in patient flow, so it is an obvious place to start. Digital intake forms will save your organization time and money and, importantly, improve the patient experience.
Patients arriving for appointments will already have submitted all the information needed for check-in, and an SMS patient notification system can be used to allow them to wait for their appointment safely offsite.
3. Improved medical decision-making process
Unlike traditional intake, where the provider often has just a few minutes to review a patient’s history before an appointment, digital intake forms enable providers to prepare well in advance and typically work with more accurate, up-to-date information.
With more time to study each patient’s record and prepare for each appointment, the medical decision-making process is improved, which directly impacts patient satisfaction.
In addition, a well-prepared provider leads to better outcomes and instils trust in their patients, greatly enhancing their experience.
4. Improved data accuracy
With 61% of insurance claim denials resulting from manual data entry errors, such as an inaccurate address or social security number, improving data accuracy – and keeping a clean patient database – is crucial.
Filing out a digital intake form in the comfort of their own homes, where they feel relaxed, can take their time, and have access to medical history information needed, results in complete patient paperwork and fewer errors.
This gives patients peace of mind and confidence, knowing that they completed and verified their own data, and it improves the patient experience as your healthcare organization is working from complete records of accurate information.
5. Reduced risk of exposure to Covid-19
Since the Covid-19 outbreak, patients have been anxious about sitting in a waiting room for extended periods, filling out paperwork, and being surrounded by other patients and staff.
Introducing digital intake forms significantly reduces the time patients need to spend in the waiting room. This minimizes their risk of exposure to bacteria and viruses through contact with your office environment, staff, and other patients.
Reducing patients’ anxiety about their safety can vastly improve their experience with your organization.
6. Enhanced patient data protection
Every healthcare organization knows how critical it is to manage patient data protection and comply with regulations, including HIPAA, to avoid costly penalties.
Digital intake forms and processes allow you to better safeguard patient privacy and ensure full compliance – providing the technology you use comes with advanced, built-in protection.
From a patient’s perspective, this offers peace of mind that their confidential data is securely stored and protected. A positive patient experience heavily relies on being able to trust their healthcare provider.
7. Improved practice-to-patient communication
Digital intake forms can help improve your practice-to-patient communication, directly impacting patient experience and satisfaction without generating extra work for your administrators.
Front office staff are typically rushed off their feet dealing with phone calls, patient queries, manually inputting data, and so on.
While they are being efficient, they can often come off as abrupt or distracted. This doesn’t set the best first impression for patients arriving for an appointment!
Using digital intake forms immediately lifts a burden from your front office staff, freeing up time to focus on patient-centric duties and improve face-to-face communications.
In addition, your digital communication with patients is improved. Patients receive personalized intake forms via email and/or text message and can receive automated reminders and timely information to improve engagement.
You can also link to patient feedback forms to encourage communication online and enhance the patient journey.
8. Increased workflows efficiency – higher quality of care
78% of healthcare quality experts cite improved clinical workflows and efficiency as keys to improving care quality and patient satisfaction.
Digital patient intake software removes time-consuming manual workflows and can be integrated to allow the automated check-in workflow to synchronize with the rest of your clinical process.
Connected workflows mean your healthcare organization can achieve greater efficiency, with instant access to patient information for review and processing, without time-consuming hand-offs.
Increased operational efficiency means your healthcare organization can deliver a higher quality of care and achieve better outcomes, significantly impacting patient experience and satisfaction.
Ready to streamline your workflow and improve the patient experience? PatientTrak’s digital forms are straightforward to set-up and so easy to use.
Our patient flow experts will have you up and running in no time.
Contact us today for a demo.
