With consumers increasingly opting for digital methods of accessing care, provider organizations are being pushed to change. Patients now expect healthcare processes to mirror the personalized and automated experiences of consumer-sector activities. However, they often find healthcare organizations falling short in this regard. This rise in healthcare consumerism means that organizations will need to implement digital-first strategies to manage growing patient expectations. Thus, digital care access tools like digital patient intake solutions are crucial. These tools improve the patient experience while decreasing administrative burden on front office staff.
Benefits of Digital Patient Intake
With the right technology, organizations can:
- Automate pre-visit paperwork like capturing demographics, clinicals, consent forms, insurance cards, and payments
- Reduce the likelihood of transcription errors caused by manual processes
- Increase Time-of-Service collections by diversifying payment methods
- Give patients the self-service options that they prefer
- Reduce in-office wait times, saving both administrative staff and patients precious time
By taking advantage of an optimal digital patient intake solution, organizations can increase staff bandwidth while also meeting the demands for a more convenient, accessible, and positive patient experience.
How Digital Patient Intake Tools Work
Kyruus Health’s Check-In Solution helps provider organizations free up staff bandwidth by automating pre-visit patient intake processes. Learn how Kyruus Health can help you streamline your patient intake and registration processes in the video below.
A Case Study: Digital Patient Intake in Action
Excerpted from PatientEngagementHIT1
It’s easy for a patient to become overwhelmed visiting the clinic or hospital. Even the patient intake process is rife with chaos and complexity, asking patients to manage a litany of forms and permissions that can, at best, be a lot of patient registration paperwork and, at worst, be a redundant blight on the patient experience.
That much was true for an Iowa-based MercyOne affiliated hospital. Even years before the pandemic, the push for more healthcare automation, patient engagement technologies, and consumer-centered care made clear the imperative for better patient registration and access tools.
These healthcare technologies have been on the market for a while, according to the Iowa-based healthcare organization’s leaders. Patient access tools let patients fill out the demographics and insurance information while also signing and submitting certain forms, all before the point of care, which is of great benefit to the patient access process.
After all, the last thing anyone wants is more paperwork in their lives.
But that’s exactly what patients would get when they visited, the patient access manager at the hospital, told PatientEngagementHIT in an interview.
“Anybody that’s come in to register, whether it’s a clinic appointment or just an outpatient lab or radiology appointment, we’ve had to capture consent forms, stability forms, insurance cards, photo IDs, communication authorization,” the patient access manager outlined. “The process to register can be very timely, especially if it’s a new patient.”
That clunky process is anathema to the healthcare patients are demanding today. The streamlined automation of other service sectors like retail, travel, and banking, has shifted the paradigm for consumer-facing industries. Healthcare can’t get away with its chaos and complexity much longer; the rise in healthcare consumerism means organizations need to streamline their processes to meet patient expectations…
The hospital turned to patient intake technology as part of a system-wide effort spearheaded by MercyOne. Alongside other affiliate hospitals, it was able to give some of its input to a network liaison, a process that was helpful in making sure a tool would fit its unique needs, said the director of the revenue cycle.
The network landed on technology from Epion (now Kyruus Health), which lets patients fill out their paperwork and upload documents and files securely by clicking a link that is sent via text or email. The hospital makes sure patients are oriented with the tool by notifying them about it after they have scheduled an appointment.
