Embarking on a healthcare journey often begins with a simple yet essential step: filling out patient forms. These forms, when digitized, are key to unlocking a personalized and efficient healthcare experience. Imagine the increased efficiency when every form — from patient medical histories to HIPAA consents — is automatically sent to the patient, completed, and then returned to the practice before the patient arrives for her visit.
This digital leap not only streamlines the process but also ensures that crucial information is at the your fingertips, ready to be used for personalized and efficient patient care. By moving from paper to digital forms, practices significantly save time, minimize paperwork, and improve the accuracy of the collected patient data.
Let's explore how these advanced forms are revolutionizing patient intake, fostering a more responsive and intuitive experience for patients.
Here are four ways online patient forms can help streamline processes within your medical practice.
Rather than asking each patient to fill out multiple paper forms when entering your office, automatically send a text message to your patients that contains a link to the needed forms before the office visit. This automatization significantly reduces the time spent passing out and collecting forms. And since the process is digital, the problems associated with illegible handwriting and annoying scanning are eliminated, again leading to more time-savings for your staff.
Online patient forms increase the operational efficiency of your practice by ensuring faster patient check-in. By enabling your patients to complete forms at their convenience, waiting times in your lobby are sharply diminished and the overall patient experience is elevated. Not only does this feature expedite the completion of forms, making patient check-in more efficient, but it also enhances patient privacy and reduces the pressure your patients feel to swiftly complete forms in the waiting area.
Digital patient forms are smartphone-friendly. When patients access forms on their cellphones, the autofill feature pre-populates fields with common information, such as names and addresses, speeding up the form-filling process and eliminating the need for repetitive data entry, a common drawback of traditional paper forms.
You can also configure the forms to ensure that the patient completes all the necessary fields before they can submit the form, preventing the submission of incomplete forms. Automated data entry also ensures data accuracy, significantly reducing the likelihood of errors. Ultimately, this minimizes the time and effort required to rectify such issues.
Digital patient forms can be tailored to meet your practice’s needs. Depending on your requirements, forms can be customized to request a variety of information, including demographic and insurance details. Patients can be asked to upload both front and back images of their insurance cards directly through the form, and to add their signatures indicating consent.
Moreover, unlike paper forms, where any modification requires manual correction or expensive reprinting, updates to these online forms can be made easily and cost-effectively. This flexibility offers a significant advantage in capturing up-to-date and accurate patient information.
The level of form customization is highly practice specific, and may involve giving patients the option to submit photos depicting their symptoms. If your practice offers Botox, for example, a form that prompts patients to share images of their resting and smiling faces could help your health practitioners assess areas that need treatment before the actual visit. You may choose to request patients of your dermatology department to upload images to illustrate skin issues, or ask orthodontic patients to provide pictures of their teeth structure. Forms inviting image submission not only speeds up patient evaluation, but makes the patient intake process more efficient for both your practice and your patients.
In Curogram, Patient Forms is a feature that resides within the platform’s Dashboard. Basically, it is an automated text message that contains a link directing patients to a form they can quickly fill in using their phone or computer. This message, which can be sent at different preset times before the office visit, consists of a configurable, personalized message similar to the following:
Dave, for your appointment with Anderson Family Practice, please click on [form link] and fill out your form before you come in to save time in the waiting room. :)
Texts are automatically sent out depending on Appointment Type, information pulled from your Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or Electronic Health Records (EHR) system. For example, individuals categorized as New Patients for a particular Appointment Type may receive a New Patient Package consisting of an Insurance form and Financial Policy form, allowing them to complete the information on their cell phone or computer.
As soon as the patient submits the information, the form is saved to the Document Section within Curogram, producing a clean, easy-to-read PDF format of the form. Curogram also offers integration with various EMR systems, which would upload the form directly to the EMR. The level of integration offered depends on the specific EMR used by your practice.
To send forms manually from the Curogram dashboard, open the Conversation tab, click on the Form button, and choose the form you’d like to send. This sends a customized message along with a link to the form, as shown in the sample message above.
Curogram offers long forms — individual forms packaged together into a single long form — to help the patient complete the needed forms more quickly. For compliance reasons, certain information must be included in each form: patient first and last name, date of birth, email and the like. If every form is completely individually by the patient, this information must be filled out again and again, leading to irritation and frustration. But when these individual forms are combined into one long form, the demographic information is required only once. This cuts down on the time it takes to complete the process, and also enhances the overall patient’s experience.
To begin experiencing the advantages offered by automated digital forms, simply send your current forms to Curogram in a Word or PDF format, and Curogram will transform them into a digital form.
By implementing automated patient forms and sending tailored forms according to the appointment type before patients arrive at your clinic, you not only facilitate a speedier check-in process and more straightforward data entry for patients, but you also ensure that patient information is securely stored, contributing to higher-quality patient care.
This enhanced process fosters a better patient experience, as it minimizes wait times and administrative burdens, allowing patients to focus more on their health and interactions with healthcare providers. Why not experience the advantages of automated patient forms for yourself? Sign up for a demo today!