You would be hard put to find anyone who has not had an unnerving or uncomfortable experience filling out patient paperwork at a healthcare office.
This first visit is stressful enough. You are either worried about specific symptoms being experienced or concerned about the diagnosis of a serious health issue. Did you remember all the appropriate paperwork? – insurance card, list of medications, list of questions you made for the doctor, etc. Even getting to the office for the first time adds to the anxiety – checking the directions, leaving enough driving time and figuring out where to park.
Now you arrive at the office and are handed a clip board with pages of forms attached and a pen that at the worst doesn’t write, and at the best skips over the surface. Often the practice, to save money, has copied a blank form over and over again and what the patient receives is a poor and sometimes hard to read patient paperwork. You fold your legs and try to balance the clip board on your knee and start to write in the answers. “Is that all the space they give me?”
So, what is the result of this scenario? More often than not, it’s illegible handwriting squeezed into tiny spaces.
This old technology has created a situation of high stress for the patient that transfers high stress to the medical or dental staff. But there are other more concerning drawbacks. Most practices that receive paper forms in a similar manner, usually have to re-type the basic patient paperwork information into their electronic medical records or practice management software and then scan the rest of the form pages.
Mistakes
When the information that is being typed by a staff member is difficult or impossible to read, odds are it won’t get typed in accurately. Even if you choose to scan the entire packet of forms, the scanned pages look exactly the same – illegible.
The consequences could lead to disastrous mistakes caused by wrong information about an allergy, a medication or a dosage. Or it may just lead to waste of precious time because an insurance ID number or some other important information could not be read.
PatientStudio online forms is a process of sending a welcome letter to the patient with a link to your forms; tracking to whom you sent the forms; tracking the patient’s progress; and automatically reminding the patient by email or texting, if the form is not timely submitted.
PatientStudio has BIG advantages for your practice – receive printed, legible information so you can validate patient’s insurance and red-flag medical problems before the patient arrives; PatientStudio drastically reduces first appointment no-shows; eliminates scanning; patient’s signature electronically captured; HIPAA compliant.