Onboarding New Patients Efficiently with HeyForm

Patient registration paperwork can be a burden, especially when being admitted or treated at a hospital. A patient in pain or distress, or a bystander whose emotions are running high, is often overwhelmed at the volume of paperwork. They make mistakes while providing critical information and can get frustrated with the inconvenience. This was the challenge that confronted Philp when he took over as hospital administrator of a multi-speciality hospital. Handling over 500 new patients each day, bottlenecks at registration were identified as the biggest challenge to patient care. Philip brought in HeyForm to streamline his hospital’s workflow and it was a roaring success.

HeyForm for Efficiency and Compliance

Philip’s focus is on creating a more efficient and compliant hospital practice. “The most important part of handling patients’ health information is HIPAA compliance. With HeyForm, we’ve created a secure and seamless patient onboarding process. We’ve processed thousands of new patients through the system” he says.

Seamless Patient Onboarding

Before the hospital switched to online forms, patients had to fill a bulky set of patient registration forms, on the day their appointment. Support staff would then have to enter the data into the hospital’s servers, create a record for the patient. All this before seeing the doctor.

This resulted in a lot of human error and created bottlenecks in the patient flow. “With so many new patients every day, our staff was hard pressed to cope. A few questions or problems with the forms tied up the whole check-in and check-out process,” says Philip. “But now, things are much smoother. Patients can easily access our registration portal powered by HeyForm. This via a link or QR code, from any device. As soon as they submit their registration form, the data automatically goes to those in the billing department, and the required authorization process begins. It reduces human error, increases the speed and efficiency of our patient flow and reduces the duplication of data entry effort for both patients and staff.”

HIPAA Compliance Simplified

The constant changes in HIPAA guidelines mean that hospitals need to constantly update their procedures and assets to ensure compliance. Online forms stand at a distinct advantage in that they can be easily modified and circulated, resulting in savings on overhead. Philip tried to enforce several workarounds to continue using the previous system, but this created many inefficiencies, redundancies and wastage. “These regulations are necessary for the sake of both the individual patient and the hospital,” says Philip. “When I got to know of HeyForm’s HIPAA compliant offering, I was thrilled. HeyForm is flexible and easy for everyone to use.”

And best of all, Philip no longer has to worry about employees inadvertently collecting patient information in a non-compliant way. With HeyForm, he has a way to centralize all data collection regarding patients. The usage of standard templates means that there is almost no mismatch between data collated by different departments. “We’re all under increasing regulatory scrutiny. With HeyForm, we have a streamlined channel for patient data collection, storage and analytics.” Philip said.

Excellent Patient Experience

There are other ways in which HeyForm helps Philip create a positive experience for patients. “We have created a portal where patients can now pose questions and concerns to a specific doctor. HeyForm powers this” says Philip.

HeyForm has also been used to gauge patients’ mental health through interactive questionnaires and rating scales. The flexibility of HeyForm allows mental health experts to craft customized questionnaires very rapidly.  The conditional logic features are used to eliminate certain questions, based on prior responses. “We have seen that patients like the experience of filling out the forms online, especially when it comes to mental health questions. Patients are more forthcoming due to the perceived anonymity of the screen,” says Philip.