Healthcare has moved increasingly digital. But even as we become more tech-savvy, an apparently simple process – the patient check-in – can seem frozen in time. A patient can order their groceries, check into a hotel, send funds from a mobile device in less time than it takes to enter a doctor‘s office and be handed a stack of forms. 

That‘s when patient intake software can be a real boon. Rather than asking patient intake software  to re-enter details repeatedly – name, address, insurance information, allergies, past treatments – a healthcare organization can gather as many of those details as possible electronically in advance of the appointment. It sounds straightforward, and frankly, it should be. But the benefits can be significant.

What is motivating the need for change in the Patient Intake Process?

Lengthy, traditional patient intakes have persisted over the years because medicine has a busy work environment. Employees are required to obtain precise information but still handle the phones, verify appointment schedules, interact with insurance, and attend to patients present in the waiting room. Utilizing paper forms hinders this process. Penmanship is hard to make out. Data can be left blank. A patient potentially fails to answer because they do not know why it is relevant. And the front-desk employee has to hunt down the particulars.

Digital intake alters the work-flow without adding complexity for the patient. Patients can be mailed or electronically sent forms a head of time and fill them out on a mobile device or computer. The data can then transfer into the practice work flow instead of sitting in a pile ready for someone to input the data. That matters because data entry is one of those jobs that looks easy until you realize how many hours staff spend doing it.

Then there is the patient experience. No one wants to get there 10 minutes early and then wait an additional 15 in order to complete paperwork. That adds another level of frustration that already exists prior to the patient even seeing the doctor. Using a digital registration process helps eliminate some of that frustration.

It‘s not technology for technology‘s sake. Which is where healthcare organizations can sometimes go wrong. Make an existing process simpler, faster and less error prone.

What Should Modern Intake Technology Proudly Boast of?

Any good intake technology should have extra value if it is simply a digital version of a paper form. If patients are still giving the same information time after time, it isn‘t improving the process. It is simply giving the clipboard a new home on a screen.

A robust digital intake workflow might gather demographic data, contact information, insurance details, medical history, consent forms, questionnaires, and any other relevant information the provider needs. Some systems can provide electronic signatures and send reminders if patients haven‘t filled out things.

The experience is just as important as the feature list. All forms need to be simple. Patients need to know what information is being asked and for what reason. TheForm system needs to work well on phones as I suspect the majority of forms will be completed on them. If the system is beautiful on a desktop but frustrating on a phone it‘s going to create problems.

And then there‘s another concern that has been overlooked: accessibility. Healthcare interacts with an extremely diverse population in terms of age, physical condition, spoken language, technical background and skill level, and accessibility considerations have to be woven into the digital process. Not every patient will want to complete an online form and some may require further help.

That doesn‘t mean digital intake fails. It simply indicates that the practice requires a secondary process. Technology should reduce the workload, not add to it.

Reducing Repetitive Data Entry

Perhaps the most obvious benefit to us is eliminating a lot of tedious re-working and copying when staff capture information once and it is used for the duration of the patient journey. This reduces duplication.

That can also be very helpful in minimizing transcription errors. An incorrect phone number or insurance ID isn‘t a big deal, but even seemingly insignificant errors can result in a catch-22 further down the line. They may be difficult to rectify.

In what ways can improved intake enhance the patient experience?

Patients aren‘t concerned with database needs or the number of mouse clicks a healthcare worker must take to accomplish something. They want the process to be simple and pleasant.

Now, take two patients about to have the same appointment. The first gets sent home the night before with a web link and a reminder that they can fill the entire form out on their laptop if they want to and needs to do little else when they come in for their visit other than bring in the insurance card. The second shows up 30 minutes early to fill out several pages by hand and be asked the same questions at the front desk because they didn‘t remember to bring the insurance card.

Neither one does anything to alter the medical care itself. But the time and place within which one receives it is a whole new creature.

This is where digital intake is linked to patient experience. It allows individuals to have more flexibility as to where and when they fill in their data. It could also decrease excessive wait times at the reception.

For busy practices, this matters. Not impressive, you might say, to spare a couple of minutes per patient. But go ahead and multiply this by dozens of brief appointments through the course of a day, and the figures begin to look a little different.

Patients also like transparency, automated reminders can indicate to patients what they need to do prior to their visit. If there is something missing they may be able to fix it prior to arriving vs. finding out at check-in.

It is not going to be as frictionless as buying shoes online and it shouldn‘t be. There are privacy, safety, insurance, and medical requirements to healthcare that do not exist in shopping. That said, there is so much excess friction to eliminate.

Where Does Epic Healthcare Software come in the Grand Scheme?

Most large healthcare institutions will have a comprehensive electronic health records system that covers clinical and administrative data. This is where epics healthcare software applies if your organisation uses the Epic system and is trying to connect disparate areas in the patient journey.

An intake process should not be an island. Data entered into registration can be used for scheduling, the clinical workflow, billing, and communication, among other things. If systems are linked, staff are not running back and forth between disconnected systems,

That integration can be especially significant in hospitals and large physician groups. The patient who enters the system may encounter providers in many departments and administrative staff from many different practices. If these individuals are working from the Department of Motor Vehicles database instead of the GPS database, trouble is sure to follow.

The real benefit of integrated healthcare environment is not to explore the value of capturing more data. It is about make. ‘useful information available to the right people at the right time in the workflow.’

Certainly the integration process is not an easy one. Healthcare organizations have varying setups, workflows, access rights, and operational demands. A practice must fully understand how its particular intake system will integrate with its existing scenario before selecting a product to address those needs.

This is why a feature checklist, one that compares products in a side by side comparison, can be a costly mistake. It is very easy to buy a program that has twenty great features and yet generate more work!

Integration Should Follow the Workflow

However, the most effective way would be to begin with the patient journey itself.

How does the process of scheduling an appointment happen?

What kind of inquiries is asked and who asks these questions? When are the forms filled out? Who receives them? Where in the process is the information stored? What occurs when information is absent?

When those questions are answered, then it becomes very easy to see where technology can assist us.

Can Digital Intake Take the Strain off Administrators?

The front-desk staff is expected to do more than they should. They take messages and transfer calls, make appointments, verify insurance, collect co-pays, answer patient questions, fill out forms and keep the waiting room running smoothly.

That isn‘t the answer either. But getting rid of duplication will.

Automated patient intake can reduce time spent by staff entering information from paper forms, and can be designed to make it simpler to pick out missing or inconsistent information prior to the patient being at the desk. This leaves staff more time to deal with the problems for which a human is truly necessary.

This is a good to highlight.

Healthcare isn‘t going to make every interaction fully automated. Patients sometimes need a person. The real point is to free up staff to focus on these situations where judgment and empathy matters.

The better intake process can also bring about more consistency. Since each patient goes through the same fundamental procedures, there are fewer steps that have to be remembered by staff to ask.

That consistency becomes important as a practice scales. A tiny clinic might be able to cut corners and work around an inefficient process with brute force. But an enterprise cannot sustain this for very long. With quantity, inefficient workflows become clear.

What Is the Criteria for Healthcare Organizations Before Arranging to Select Software?

You shouldn‘t be asking when selecting an intake platform, “which system has the most functions?” That‘s the wrong question.

Begin by identifying the problem.

If patients are frequently coming in with missing paperwork, investigate automated reminder systems and pre-admission forms. If staff are manually entering hours of demographic data, consider ways to collect and integrate that data into the workflow. If patients are commenting on long check-in time, analyze the entire registration process.

Security needs to be taken seriously as well. A lot of patient related data is sensitive, and healthcare organizations require systems which facilitate the right privacy and security requirements. Access controls, handling of data, authentication, audit functions and policies are important.

Easy to use also plays a part. If staff need a month of training to get to grips with it then it‘s likely to be a real problem getting practice usage. Patients are even more uncompromising, nobody wants to fill in an incomprehensible form.

Healthcare organizations need to consider scalability. A solution that works well in one physician office may not scale up easily in addition to other practices or specialties. An individual needs of a primary care office will be far different from a hospital department.

And then there is support. Software does not exist in isolation. Things go wrong. Processes change. New employees are hired. Questions arise. The organization must have an effective means to obtain assistance when things are not functioning.

Simple is better. The best solution is the one that‘s right for the organization, not the one with the longest feature page.

What Is the Benefit of Better Intake to Long Term Efficiency?

Patient intake can seem like just a tiny administrative step, but because it is at the start of the patient journey, it can have surprisingly big effects.

It can also spread when registration is slow. Staff become busy. Patients become restless. Appointments run over schedule. Data entry is delayed. Mistakes are carried forward. Anger mounts.

A more structured digital intake process might help stop some of that chain reaction.

This also can provide a much more robust infrastructure for other digital services. If demographics and registration are collected properly during registration there is the correct data available for downstream workflows. Scheduling, communication, billing, and clinical workflows all rely on correct patient information.

Now that does not mean software somehow PPI all of your – all of your operational problems! No, it does not. But if the workflow is flawed, the software won‘t do anything to address that, it will just make those bad processes digital.

Organizations need to evaluate the process. Eliminate questions not needed. Streamline complicated steps. Determine what information is actually necessary. Then technology used to support this optimized procedure.

One thing that usually gets overlooked is:

The Human Side Still Matters

But even in a highly digital process, healthcare is still decidedly personal. A patient could be nervous, ill, disoriented, or just having a bad day. An easy check-in process can help them take the first few minutes in stride.

Technology is there to support that human interaction instead of become human interaction.

Conclusion: Make Intake Easier Without Making Healthcare Feel Impersonal

The patient check in process doesn‘t have to be complex. It just has to work more efficiently.

Using patient intake software enables providers to capture data earlier, eliminate the need for duplicate data entry, enhance registration accuracy and streamline appointment scheduling for both staff and patients. When integrated properly into the larger healthcare infrastructure, including those models based on epic healthcare software, the advantages can be felt well beyond the front counter.

But selecting software is not about catching each new addition. It‘s about seeing where patients get hung up and nurses get slowed down; then knock those items out one by one.

A digital form alone is not transformation. It‘s a seamless patient journey.

People will be the core of healthcare always. That is right. The more intelligent pursuit is not trying to shrink people in healthcare, rather to eliminate the superfluous political, administrative, clerical, etc. clutter so that patients spend less time filling in forms and more time getting treated.

FAQs

What is a patient intake software?

Patient intake software is an electronic tool to electronically gather registration, demographic, insurance, medical history, consent and other patient information prior to or during a visit.

In what way can digital patient intake enhance the check-in process?

Pre-visit forms/Digital intake. Patients can fill out forms online prior to their visit, which has the potential to decrease the amount of paperwork, time spent at the front desk, and free up staff to spend more time with patients who need in-person attention.

Will customer entry software integrate with Epic?

This is possible depending on the solution, setup, interoperability, and needs of the healthcare organization. The healthcare organization should assess how a platform shares data with their current Epic systems before implementing the platform.

Is online registration of patients more advantageous than traditional paper registration?

For most healthcare organizations, online registration will simply help avoid many manual entries and to the extent possible offer convenience. Paper or assisted registration may still be required for patients who are unwilling or unable to use computing devices.

What feature would you want in any patient intake software to make your work easier?

Essential features might be: electronic forms, preregistration, electronic certification, automated reminders, mobile capabilities, secure storage of data, integration with workflow, with tools for guidance on missing data

Digital team intake: would it lower the workload?

It can. For example, if informed individuals gather information prior to appointments and eliminate redundant effort, front desk workers could dedicate more time to direct (patient) activities and more complicated administrative duties.

What role does integration play in healthcare software?

Integration facilitates the movement of information between linked work flows and on scale obviates the need for staff to copy or re-enter information multiple times.