Digital intake helps your practices streamline the overall process from patient registration to payment processing and follow-up visits. However, most practices still rely on manual and paper intake processes, causing staff burnout. Outdated paperwork workflows are prone to human errors, making it difficult to access the right data at the right time while providing the necessary treatment to the patients.
Fortunately, digitizing patient intake tackles these challenges and offers several benefits for practices, patients, and providers.
Why Should Practices Implement Digital Intake for their Patients?
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Increase Patient Satisfaction
According to surveys, 94% of patients use online reviews to choose their providers. Offering the best care that aligns with your patients’ expectations is critical, making patient satisfaction the top priority for any practice. Extended wait times can severely impact patient satisfaction. Many patients report leaving a physician's office before being seen due to excessive waits, and some even consider switching providers because of the delay. This is where the digital intake comes in. By digitizing the patient intake process, practices can enhance the patient's experience, allowing them to complete online intake forms ahead of their appointments. It also reduces waiting times through a mobile pre-check-in and place-in-line options.
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Improve Practice Efficiency
Healthcare quality experts stress that improving clinical workflows and efficiency is vital for enhancing care quality. Yet, your practice staff may need help accomplishing these tasks. By digitizing patient intake, your practice can eliminate manual tasks like copying forms, scanning paperwork, and managing clipboards. Implementing a digital intake solution for your practice can save valuable time for both patients and staff. With medical patient intake form, your practice can streamline front desk operations, allowing patients to complete forms from home. This efficiency enables your staff to have excellent communication with patients for better medical practice management.
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Solve Staffing Challenges
In the past, practices prioritized patients over staff. However, with the increasing competition and staffing challenges, it is crucial to value both equally. A digital intake solution can help your practice address staffing challenges and reduce administrative burden and fatigue. By continuing the same traditional intake process, your practice will take more time than ever. Here is how digital intake and automation platform can help your practice: --> Eliminate Manual Data Entry – Traditional patient intake depends on paper forms and manual data entry, increasing administrative burden on staff, who must manually type in all patient information into the system. Our digital intake approach automates data capture, reducing the time and effort required for manual entry tasks. --> No more Scanning and Duplication – Accessing patient data by multiple personnel, from the front desk to the provider requires extensive scanning and duplication efforts. CERTIFY Health, a digital patient intake solution, streamlines this process by integrating with most common EHRs, eliminating the need for duplication and scanning.
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Reduce Office Expenses
Healthcare practices using inefficient paper-based processes will increase overhead expenses, spending at least 3 percent of their annual revenue on paper. Dental practices have recently experienced significant savings by eliminating the need for fax machines, ink cartridges, copiers, ink, printer maintenance, clipboards, and pens. Switching to digital medical intake forms is an ideal solution for eliminating overhead costs, saving thousands of dollars on paper-related expenses, and increasing your practice's revenue through improved efficiency.
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Enhance Patient Data Protection
Protected health information must be kept secure. However, a recent cyberattack on Change Healthcare in February 2024 threatened the security of patients’ information, highlighting the critical importance of protecting patient data. Some larger health systems experienced losses of up to $100 million per day due to this incident, highlighting the severe financial and reputational impacts that such breaches can cause. That is why strict HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) privacy laws exist to ensure patient data protection. Digitizing your intake forms and processes helps to safeguard patient privacy and ensures HIPAA compliance. Choose a digital intake platform with advanced, built-in security protection for patient information. CERTIFY Health is one of the best digital intake platforms, and it is compliant with HIPAA rules and regulations to safeguard your patient data.
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Provide Intelligent Scheduling Capabilities
Digital intake provides advanced scheduling options, eliminating the need for patients to call staff frequently to book appointments. This feature allows patients to easily book, reschedule, or cancel appointments online, significantly reducing the administrative workload and ensuring a smoother experience for both staff and patients. With intelligent scheduling capabilities, practices can streamline registration with digital forms, automate patient outreach with appointment reminders and communication tools, and enable staff to optimize schedule capacity and match patients to the right provider at the right time.
Launching your Digital Patient Intake Journey
Utilizing digital patient intake is a no-brainer due to its numerous benefits to practices. A digital intake approach streamlines the patient journey by
- Alleviating staff workload stresses and burnout
- Eliminating waiting room congestion
- Reducing unnecessary office expenses
- Minimizing data entry errors
While most practices report that their digital intake solution helps them to improve the patient experience, practices still need the right patient intake platform to make this happen.
CERTIFY Health’s patient intake solution simplifies the entire intake process with advanced digital tools such as
Advanced communication tools like two-way texting, broadcast messaging, and more
- FaceCheck (Patient Identification)
- Multiple payment options
- Appointment reminders
- Mobile pre-registration
- Digital check-in options
A digital intake platform offers patients a convenient, mobile-friendly way to get the services they need before, during, and between their office visits. This modern approach ensures a better patient experience and enhances overall practice efficiency.
