How can Healthcare Providers Elevate Patient Experiences by Streamlining Their Consent and Documentation Processes

The healthcare industry worldwide is known for its voluminous paperwork requirements. A patient seeking appointment, admission, or any other form of care from a healthcare facility is required to fill in bundles of documents including registration forms, consent forms, insurance information, etc before reaching the final point of care. For someone already dealing with physical, emotional stress due to illness, these cumbersome processes and the consequent long wait times could be immensely taxing. Added to this, the paperwork formalities involved during patient procedures, pharmacy, exit, etc pushes them to the edge.

Digitizing Patient Experiences Is No Longer An Option

Although many providers have moved away from the manual paperwork processes and embraced digitization in a few steps of the patient journey, they are yet not fully equipped to offer a wholesome, streamlined patient experience. The legacy systems used by various care providers are unable to effectively manage the influx of voluminous data across various touchpoints of the patient journey. Multiple forms are still being emailed to the patients in PDF or other compatible formats, which are required to be duly filled and sent back. Many of these forms are lengthy, complex and cannot be completed without proper expert guidance. As a result, the patients often get confused and at times send back incorrect or incomplete forms to the institution. This in turn increases the burden of the healthcare staff, who is required to review the forms multiple times, sending them back and forth until they are finally approved.

Moreover, in case a patient needs to change or update any important information such as change of address, payment information, etc, during a later stage, the process becomes overly complex and weary for both, patients as well as the medical staff.

Unified Digital Solution: The Smart, Efficient Way Forward

The use of a single, unified digital solution ensures that the entire patient data and consent is instantly, securely captured through only one medium, which is highly secure and compliant. Patients need not download multiple PDF or other forms, fill them, and email them back to the care facility. Instead, medical staff can simply share the link of the document with the patients via email or SMS. Patients can conveniently click on the link, go through each step, fill and review information, apply eSignatures – all in one single session using any of their preferred devices. This eliminates the need for them to sit with piles of documents manually or download and fill multiple lengthy forms separately.

Processes such as patient registration get highly streamlined, as one can easily complete the registration formalities anytime, anywhere from their smartphones, even before reaching the medical facility. The process of patient discharge is also made easy, as discharge summaries can be sent digitally to the patients post their exit, eliminating the need for them to manually fulfil the discharge formalities on premise.

Digitally signed documents can conveniently and securely be shared between authorized parties, who can even view them safely at any given time in the future. Moreover, electronically signed documents are fully compliant with HIPAA, eIDAS and other key legislations.

In the end, as healthcare staff gets relieved from the burden of manual document handling and administration, they are now able to focus more on improving their key output, ie, patient care. Consequently, healthcare providers can now effectively raise their bar of patient experiences by smoothly leading them to top-notch clinical care.

Clearly, the post-Covid19 healthcare era is starkly different from the previous one, where digitization of processes could still be an option for some instituions. However, the evolved patient fraternity is increasingly averse to slow, tardy paper-based processes. Therefore, it is imperative for one and all to adopt a smart digitized approach and bid adieu to the cumbersome documentation processes.

Gazing into the future, it is certain that only those institutions that have a highly patient-centric culture that are bound to win! Are you too looking to streamline the patient consent and documentation processes for your healthcare facility? Get in touch with MSB Docs!