Are Paper Consents Holding Back Your Oracle Health Workflow?

Here’s Why It’s Time to Go Digital

Let’s be honest: in a world where almost everything is digital, paper-based informed consents in healthcare feel like relics of another era. Yet for many organizations using Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), the informed consent process is still paper-heavy, clunky, and frustrating for everyone involved.

I talk to health IT and clinical teams every week who feel buried under all this paperwork. If that’s you, you’re not alone—here’s why going digital (especially with Interlace Health’s Informed Consent Nova) is a total game-changer.

The Real Problems with Paper Consents

Paper consents aren’t just an annoyance; they’re a serious time suck and a compliance headache. Research shows that traditional paper-based consent processes create significant workflow challenges, with recent studies highlighting issues of low comprehensibility, lack of customization, and limited time for discussion with medical staff¹. The whole process—from finding the right form to getting signatures, scanning, and uploading—can eat up 20 to 30 minutes per consent form for nurses and doctors. Multiply that across every procedure, every shift, and suddenly you’re looking at over 10,000 wasted staff hours a year in a mid-sized hospital.

And let’s not forget lost paperwork. Studies show that surgical delays due to missing consent forms cost $62 per minute, with a 500-bed hospital losing an average of $265,112 annually due to consent-related delays². Up to 7% of paper consents are incomplete, missing, or illegible—and recovering them is a compliance officer’s nightmare. Documentation errors remain a top concern for healthcare quality and safety³.

Oracle Health’s Gap in Consent Workflow

You might assume your Oracle Health EHR already has this covered. Not quite. Yes, Oracle Health is a powerful EHR, but when it comes to informed consent, built-in options are limited: think scanning, generic consents or thousands of individual consent types to build, and not a lot of workflow automation or mobile support. That means IT and HIM teams are still left patching together solutions, and clinicians go back to paper just to keep things moving.

A Digital Solution That Actually Works—with Oracle Health

That’s where Interlace Health’s Informed Consent Nova comes in. It’s not just “compatible” with Oracle Health; it’s tightly integrated, so your digital consents sync instantly into the EHR—no more manual uploads or workarounds.

Here’s how it pays off for your team:

• IT: Nova is ready-made for Oracle Health. You’ll spend 50% less time on integration and ongoing maintenance compared to trying to build something in-house.
• Nurses and clinicians: Collecting a consent drops from 30 minutes to under 5 minutes when you can do it digitally at the bedside or even before the visit. That’s hundreds of hours given back to patient care—not fighting with printers and scanners.
• HIM and compliance: Nearly every consent form—99.9%—is complete, legible, and audit-ready, slashing compliance problems and “missing consent” chases to near zero.
• Doctors will use the software: Consents can be sent in advance for the consult so patients can come prepar with questions. Explaining the procedure and capturing the Consent signatures on a tablet is much easier than rifling through pages.

And Now—Remote Consents Are a Must-Have

Healthcare isn’t confined to the four walls of the hospital anymore. With remote care on the rise, giving patients the power to review and sign consent forms from home or their mobile device is a huge win. Patients come in informed, paperwork is done ahead of time, and clinics move much faster.

The 2022 HIMSS Future of Healthcare Report shows a clear trend toward digital and personalized care⁴, with healthcare organizations increasingly recognizing the need for digital solutions that increase patient engagement and streamline provider workflows⁵. Research indicates 85% of healthcare organizations see remote consents as critical to scaling telehealth and outpatient care, but only a third have a reliable solution. Interlace Health bridges that gap for Oracle Health customers, letting you deliver consents securely and conveniently—anywhere, anytime.

Bottom Line: The ROI Is Real

• 70% reduction in time wasted on consents across your whole organization
• $250,000 to $500,000 per year saved for a 300-bed hospital
• Fewer compliance headaches, less lost paperwork, and much happier clinicians and patients

Ready to see what life looks like without the paper chase? Interlace Health’s Informed Consent Nova is built for Oracle Health and built for the way modern care teams need to work.

References

1. Cambridge Core – Journal of Clinical and Translational Science: Informed consent: Old and new challenges in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
2. Interlace Health: Challenges in Digitizing Informed Consents, and How to Overcome Them
3. NCBI Bookshelf: Informed Consent – StatPearls
4. HIMSS: 2022 Future of Healthcare Report Shows Trend Toward Digital Care
5. Becker’s Hospital Review: Informed consents are going digital – 5 ways electronic solutions are transforming provider, patient experience

Note: Some statistics in this blog post are based on internal Interlace Health studies and customer testimonials. For specific ROI calculations and case study details, please contact Interlace Health directly.