Where some industries remain slow to adopt new digital technology, those in healthcare are fully embracing it. A quick look at the statistics shows that digitizing healthcare and investing in new technologies remain top of mind for many healthcare organizations – from migrating to the cloud to utilizing mobile apps, wearables, IoT, and AI.
- 86 percent of ‘office-based physicians’ are using electronic health record (EHR) systems
- There are currently more than 325,000 mobile health apps available from app stores
- The global healthcare cloud computing market is said to increase to US$11 billion by 2022
Digital transformation for digital transformation’s sake is not the objective. Digitizing healthcare must add value to the healthcare organization itself and to doctors and patients.
By using digital technology to streamline simple processes, such as patient registration, healthcare organizations can really add value. Replacing paper-based forms with modern, electronic, automated forms is one way to achieve this.
This post will explore the ways healthcare organizations can turn paper-based forms into electronic documents and manual processes into automated ones – from improving the patient experience to ensuring ongoing compliance with healthcare regulations.
Why forms are so valuable for digitizing healthcare
These days, doctors, patients, and administrators use mobile and cloud technology in their everyday lives. For this reason, it can feel outdated to receive a clipboard and pen every time a patient seeks medical services. There are several reasons this manual process is far from ideal:
- Repetitive – Most patients have filled out similar forms on countless occasions.
- Prone to human error – Information is not always accurate.
- Sensitive – The information patients provide is often sensitive, so these need to be stored securely and in compliance with strict healthcare regulations.
- Hard to manage for administrators – administrative staff must type all of this information into the EHR system.
In an industry like healthcare, where time and efficiency are of the essence, digitizing healthcare forms will have a huge impact. With electronic forms, patients can be given tablets and other mobile devices to fill out a form quickly on arrival. They could even log into a secure site on their mobiles and provide all the required information prior to their arrival.
Patients, doctors, and administrators alike are ready to embrace electronic healthcare records. Modern forms should be at the forefront of any healthcare organization’s approach to making the experience as seamless, secure, and accurate as possible.
Further benefits of digitizing healthcare forms
Here are some examples of how digitizing healthcare forms can drive efficiencies and improve the experiences of patients, doctors, and healthcare administrators.
1. Improve the patient experience
Digital forms can be used in a wide range of areas to improve the patient experience. For instance, you can use digital forms to survey patients to improve your services and patient satisfaction. Patients are more likely to fill out a questionnaire on their mobile device if it takes a few minutes, rather than filling it out with pen and paper. The captured data can be sent quickly for internal review and insights can be generated much sooner without a member of staff having to leaf through paperwork and make their own analysis.
2. Comply with regulatory standards
Handling sensitive patient data is a huge concern for healthcare organizations, which face increased scrutiny over data security with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA). Forms can help you remain compliant by ensuring that sensitive patient data is stored in the right place at the right time and is kept in secure locations.
When a patient or doctor adds sensitive data directly into an EHR system via electronic forms, it can be stored compliantly at the point of entry. With paper-based processes, you must rely on paper forms being stored correctly and kept safe and/or deleted when required. This way sensitive patient data can only be accessed by the right people.
3. Employee recruitment and contract management
Managing the recruitment and contracts of your staff is critical. Electronic forms can be used to make sure essential information about new recruits is recorded, speeding up the hiring process. Ensuring that clinics and hospitals are fully staffed with qualified physicians is essential to successful healthcare provision.
What’s more, when new doctors start, they need to be onboarded quickly. Electronic forms can help speed this up.
Why Nintex Forms
Nintex Forms help organizations to streamline form-based processes and remove your reliance on paper.
- Make it quick and easy to build forms with the drag-and-drop functionality of Nintex. No code is required to create and customize powerful modern forms.
- Modern forms ensure that data is collected accurately, stored in the right place, and complies with all security and regulatory standards.
- Modern forms can be created and filled out on any device with responsive design, so the user experience for patients and doctors is of the highest standard.
With Nintex Forms your healthcare organization will receive a modern solution to replace paper-based processes. Beyond just forms, the Nintex Platform provides a wide range of tools that can help you manage, automate, and optimize all of your business processes from start to finish.
To find out more about digitizing healthcare through Nintex forms and automated workflows, get in touch with one of the team today or visit our website to read more about Nintex healthcare solutions.
