How to master patient experience with paperless onboarding?
The healthcare sector is changing rapidly. With technology evolving each day and smart devices getting more and more accessible, patients expect automation, digitization, and instant support. They don’t want to be overwhelmed with time-consuming tasks. As a result, the healthcare industry is shifting its focus to improving patient experience.
For creating an excellent patient’s experience you first have to respect the patient’s time and privacy, to meet their expectations for ease of healthcare services and to establish good communication with them. This means providing patients with easy access to forms and health information, protecting patient information by implementing necessary safeguards, offering timely appointments, and keeping wait times down. For succeeding in any of these components you will need to establish smooth workflow processes.
Today we will take a deep look into the patient onboarding workflow which is playing a vital part in creating this excellent patient experience which healthcare providers strive for. Onboarding can be nerve-wracking and requires a lot of time and effort. Providing a paperless onboarding process to your patients is critical when it comes to patient experience. Having a safe and dedicated digital format connects everyone for collaborative care anywhere in the world.
Now, after we have defined that a paperless onboarding process is important, let’s take a look into the steps for succeeding in it?
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Collect all needed data in advance
Online forms can be embedded on sites or mobile applications, or shared via a link. This way you give your patients easy access and the flexibility to fill all needed details before even entering your medical institution. This will save time for your staff and will help you create a smoother patient flow. Additionally, with online forms you get higher completion rates and fewer errors.
For increasing the credibility of your facility you can easily customize the forms to look professional and branded. You can also benefit from some useful features that prevent patients feeling overwhelmed. For example, conditional formatting can be added to keep certain fields hidden if they aren’t relevant to a patient. This can be done easily based on the patient’s previous selection. Additionally you can create groups and thus divide the roles and permissions of the people, who take part in the data collection process. Advanced form building platforms like Metaforms provide those beneficial features and many more.
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Safe time and route information automatically
You have collected all the needed information and made sure all data is secured. Now it’s time to do your homework and make that good first impression every healthcare provider strives for.
Routing the information automatically to the concerned staff and departments will help you plan the treatment, or verify insurance and other details before the patient’s arrival. This way you can prepare for your patient’s first visit in advance and prove that you value patients’ time.
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Security matters
When it comes to collecting sensitive patient’s data, GDPR and HIPAA compliance is а top priority. Protecting the information you collect from patients via online forms is an important part of your paperless patient onboarding process. Not only does it decrease your chance of a security breach, but it also boosts your credibility and helps you maintain patient’s trust. Using GDPR and HIPAA compliment online forms providers like Metaforms will help you collect data safely and avoid costly violations.
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Schedule next steps with ease
Another useful feature that comes when you adopt paperless forms is that you can easily plan additional steps in the patient’s treatments. When next steps are needed or you need to refer the patient to another specialist for additional check-up, you can do that with just a few clicks. Just pick the required form and route the needed information to the concerned departments.
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Ask for a feedback
The final part of your paperless onboarding process is the feedback-gathering. Once a patient’s information has been routed to the appropriate location and he/she has been given the necessary service, it’s time to find out about the patient’s experience.The best way to improve your patient onboarding and ensure a positive experience is to talk to patients. You can collect patient’s feedback using the same digital forms that you used for collecting patient’s initial data. Gathering patient feedback on your digital onboarding workflow can help you iterate on the process to ensure you’re continually working toward the ultimate goal of providing a high-quality experience for all patients.
Conclusion:
Time is the most important resource nowadays. Adopting online healthcare forms will help you save time for you and your patients and at the same time will protect patient’s health information through seamless data storage and routing and enhanced security features.
For more information about Metaforms’ capabilities and how it can simplify your Healthcare and Clinical Data Collection processes: