How Technology Transforms Patient Care
Blog: Kofax - Smart Process automation
It’s a familiar and frustrating scenario. New patients arrive in your ER or need to schedule surgery or an outpatient procedure or in your hospital or surgery center. They may have difficulty communicating, reside out of state, or can’t remember their last physician visit. Yet, they still must fill out many forms, and it’s your responsibility to track down any missing information, which could be paper-based or locked away in a remote database.
Now imagine if you could instantly access each patient’s relevant personal, medical and financial information. The potential to revolutionize the patient admissions process and the overall patient experience is now possible via the use of patient admissions technology.
Patients expect personalized service.
It may seem a bit strange to think of patients as customers, but that’s exactly who they are. The healthcare industry, like the retail and banking industries, sees countless customers come through its doors each day.
While the primary concern for patients is to have their physical or mental maladies treated, they also desire personalized service that addresses their needs quickly and accurately. In short, they expect the same type of technological conveniences in healthcare that they have been accustomed to in other industries for years. Patient admissions technology can help you exceed these customer expectations.
How does patient admissions automation work?
Patient admissions technology makes a patient’s first visit easier as soon as they arrive at your healthcare facility. It all starts with scanning their personal documents (such as driver’s licenses, insurance cards, and medical records). Next, admissions software quickly captures information from the scanned documents, validates it, and uses it to automatically fill in the patient’s medical history, medication lists, insurance information, and other digital forms. Finally, the completed forms are electronically distributed to appropriate healthcare specialists and administrators to expedite the patient’s treatment.
The quick, accurate capture and distribution of digital patient information help patients spend less time in the waiting room and more time receiving the care they need. Using a single sign-on, clinicians can access and interact with clinical images and reports for all their patients in a single view across your enterprise.
Who does patient admissions automation help?
For healthcare providers, patient admissions automation opens the door to more efficient communication between medical, administrative and accounting departments.
For patients, patient admissions automation facilitates a more personalized and efficient experience in the crucial First Mile of their care.
Statistics show that brand perception and customer loyalty are heavily shaped by a good or bad First Mile experience. The First Mile speeds admissions, allows admissions and patient data to be recorded in real time and then shares the information among medical departments.
For clinicians and administrators, patient admissions automation eliminates manual, paper-based processes, making it easier to share data and provide real-time access to patient information. Clinicians and administrators can then use this information to make better-informed decisions.
Examples of how patient admissions automation are helping healthcare organizations:
As physicians continue to face higher insurance deductibles and surging competition from telemedicine services, patient admissions automation is one of the few remaining areas where they still have real opportunities to significantly reduce risk, save money and remain competitive.
For example, Macquarie University Hospital’s automated system recognizes scanned paper documents and reads handwritten surnames and dates of birth, auto-filling healthcare records for staff to verify. This innovation automates the filing process, reduces the risk of filing errors, and saves time.
Vidant Health, another healthcare provider, is also realizing cost savings and other benefits by transforming their patient onboarding/admissions process with digital scanning and distribution of patient information.
What are the risks of ignoring onboarding technology?
Healthcare providers that continue to manually manage mountains of paperwork and traditional, paper-based processes run the risks of increased human error, greater operational costs, and the inability to share vital patient information among departments.
Healthcare workers who want to reduce costs, make it easier for patients to communicate with them, offer the best patient care, and make better-informed decisions, can transform patient care by taking advantage of the advanced information sharing and real-time access to patient information that patient admissions technology provides.
Which industry trends do admissions automation address?
Admissions automation addresses several healthcare industry trends, including:
Alleviating increased workload pressures. Recent healthcare trends show a sharp rise in mergers between medical practices and hospitals, and increased workload pressures on physicians who treat patients insured under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
By streamlining their admissions processes with digital scanning and automatically populating patient information into their medical history, medication lists, insurance information, and other digital forms, healthcare providers are able to share patient information faster, with fewer errors. Admissions automation electronically routes the completed digital forms to the appropriate caregivers, providing them with a quick, accurate understanding of each client’s medical history and healthcare needs.
The increasing demand for mobile communication. Technology is also transforming how consumers interact with their healthcare providers. More people continue to use the Internet to check their symptoms online prior to visiting their doctor. And, according to a recent PwC study, nearly half of all healthcare consumers and 79% of physicians believe mobile devices can help improve the efficiency of patient care.
The need for patients to make decisions concerning their healthcare, 24/7.
In the ever-changing world of healthcare, patients want to be engaged in the decision-making process regarding their treatment, anywhere, anytime, from the convenience of their cell phone or other digital devices. When these channels of communication are not available to them, patients often feel isolated. E-connect, mobile apps and secure messaging via their smartphones or other digital devices can help patients stay connected with their healthcare provider.
In Closing
Today’s medical practitioners continue to cope with an unprecedented flood of information. Both medical practitioners and their patients can save time, eliminate risk and achieve better outcomes with patient admissions software’s combined data sets, documents, processes and platforms that help them attain a more holistic view of each patient.
Learn more about how smart technologies are helping healthcare providers reduce costs and transform patient care by visiting us.
Sources
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/835123 (high deductibles, telemedicine)
http://www.wsj.com/articles/health-care-providers-insurers-supersize-1442850400 (mergers)
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/11/04/doctors-hospitals-wont-accept-obamacare-marketplace-plans (higher caseloads)
https://www.pwc.com/us/en/health-industries/top-health-industry-issues/assets/pwc-healthcare-delivery-of-the-future.pdf (p 2)
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