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Say Goodbye to Paper-Based Workflows and Reduce Burnout

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Many healthcare organizations struggle with managing paper records — particularly for informed consent. Electronic consent solutions offer a better way.

If you were asked to choose between filling out an informed consent document either on paper or online, you’d likely choose the latter. After all, electronic forms are simpler, more convenient, and more reliable than their paper counterparts. But for many healthcare organizations, paper processes remain in place despite the associated risks of waste, lost documents, and human error.

With electronic health solutions rapidly becoming the norm, healthcare organizations have found that moving from paper to electronic informed consent makes a huge difference in their work. It not only reduces the risk of human error, but it also helps improve efficiency. As a result, a digital approach gives healthcare professionals the ability to focus on what matters most: care.

A Farewell to Paper Forms

Even though most healthcare organizations started using electronic health records (EHRs) more than a decade ago, many still rely on paper documents for their workflows — particularly when obtaining informed consent. Despite consistently using paper documents, most healthcare organizations aren’t happy with the process.

Paperwork burdens are one of the leading causes of burnout among clinicians. Nearly half of all clinicians suffer from burnout regularly because paper processes create unnecessary work and require attention that could be focused elsewhere. It also creates a variety of communication inefficiencies that can be costly for healthcare organizations.

Thankfully, there is some good news: With the right partner and an electronic consent solution that integrates with your EHR to collect informed consent documents digitally, you can significantly improve the way your organization operates. With a digital-first approach, team members can easily assign the right forms and deliver them to the right patients on any device of their choosing. Fields are automatically filled in with relevant demographic information, minimizing the chance of incorrect information being entered. Documents are far less likely to go missing, and everyone saves time — all of which can make a huge difference when it comes to burnout.

This might sound overly optimistic for something as simple as switching away from paper for informed consent forms and other medical documents, but it’s the truth. Think of it this way: You might only save 10 minutes per patient by following a digital-first approach in the process of obtaining informed consent. That may not sound like much when you view it as only one interaction, but informed consent is part of every single procedure a hospital performs. Subtract 10 minutes from each of your daily procedures, and you’ll quickly see how electronic informed consent enables you to devote significantly more time to other work.

That kind of added efficiency could make transformative workflow improvements in your organization. By eliminating paper-based workflows and switching to electronic informed consent, you can create a more efficient and accurate care experience with the added benefit of reducing burnout in healthcare professionals.

For many healthcare workers, these extra minutes in a day are priceless. Team members will be able to shift to more patient-centric activities: the reason healthcare workers got into the field in the first place.

It’s time to embrace the future of healthcare and say goodbye to managing paper records for informed consent. To learn more about our electronic informed consent solution, download our whitepaper on the topic.

How a Digital-First Approach Also Puts People First

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By moving away from paper processes and implementing a digital-first approach, medical professionals can make an impact on patient care.

Last year, a study conducted with 551 orthopedic patients aimed to answer one key question: “Why is educating patients important?” Participants were surveyed about their satisfaction with their care and then given a test to determine how well they understood their upcoming treatment. Six months later, patients took another survey to assess how they had fared.

The study consistently found that patients who were informed enough to take a more active role in their care decisions were not only much happier with their care, but they also ended up with better results. Because medical regulations require healthcare organizations to obtain informed consent before every procedure, these results should be encouraging. In theory, at least.

There’s a problem: Informed consent processes are far from consistent in healthcare. Only 36% of patients in the study were found to be well-informed about their care. Despite everyone having to sign similar consent forms before receiving treatment, the actual quality of the information patients received varied widely.

There are numerous reasons someone might not be properly informed about a procedure. They can vary from doctor to doctor, patient to patient, and hospital to hospital, which makes this concern hard to address on a larger scale. However, specific operational improvements can help healthcare organizations focus more on engaging patients in their care.

One of those involves informed consent and, specifically, moving away from paper consent forms and implementing electronic informed consent. This one change can make a big difference because it helps clinicians save time, work more efficiently, and focus more on care.

How Going Digital Puts the Emphasis Back on People

With electronic informed consent, healthcare professionals can spend more time on care and less on paperwork. Electronic forms can automatically be populated with relevant information, eliminating the burden for staff members who normally have to write in the same details they already have on file for every one of these documents.

This is a small difference for a single form, but it adds up to a lot of time saved when you think of how often your team has to obtain informed consent. On top of that, electronic forms reduce the risk of human error and of misplaced or lost files — all of which can affect patient care.

While electronic informed consent won’t directly let patients take more ownership of their healthcare decisions or better engage with their providers, it will help providers gather and store their data more accurately and efficiently. Ultimately, this shift will give providers more time to devote to care. By taking a digital-first approach to consent, healthcare organizations can free up time to focus on what matters most: the people.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help digitize your informed consent process.

 

Informed Consent White Paper:Electronic Informed Consent’s Role in a Robust Telehealth Offering

3 Lessons Learned from the Explosion of Telehealth

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As the COVID-19 pandemic led to stay-at-home orders across the country and a need to lessen exposure and strain on the healthcare system, healthcare organizations shut their doors to non-emergency visits. This sudden change pushed telehealth from an evolution to a revolution overnight.  

While telehealth has been steadily growing in the industry over the past few years, the pandemic has pushed it to new heights, with virtual visits increasing by 4,345% in March and April alone.

In a recent article featured on Healthcare Business Today, I shared the below three takeaways from the unprecedented growth of telehealth and how it will shape the future of healthcare.

  1. Telehealth goes beyond virtual visits. While virtual visits are one of the most well-known aspects of telehealth, remote monitoring and patient portals, as an example, enable providers to take a proactive approach to patient care in ways that traditional health services simply cannot.
  2. Virtual care saves lives. Telehealth visits limit exposure to COVID-19 for patients and healthcare workers alike, but remote monitoring technology can also go a long way in treating contagious patients without risking lives.
  3. More work needs to be done on infrastructure. When the pandemic hit, healthcare organization had to move fast. Going forward, blending digital solutions with existing processes needs to be carefully examined to create effective, and user-friendly methods for patients to access their data and communicate with their doctors.

COVID-19 has done a lot to highlight telehealth’s potential, but it has also clarified how much more work is needed. As we move into a post COVID-19 world, organizations will need to rethink all of their processes through a digital lens.

View the full article in Healthcare Business Today.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

 

Dessiree Paoli is a senior solution manager at Interlace Health, a company that transforms workflows by providing clinicians and patients with digital healthcare solutions. She has more than 18 years of experience in driving strategic marketing initiatives and developing integrated campaigns. She also has worked in healthcare for more than 12 years, including experience with a large children’s hospital, a national urgent care chain, and several HIT organizations.

The COVID-19 Vaccine Has Arrived, but Remote Patient Intake is Here to Stay

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The FDA recently gave emergency approval to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for COVID-19, and more vaccines are under review for the same approval now. This is a major accomplishment, a potential light at the end of a very long tunnel. With these effective vaccines, we can hopefully — sooner rather than later — get back to in-person work and school, and spending time (face-to-face) with family and friends. But, will patients want to get back to sitting in crowded waiting rooms before appointments? Probably not. As a healthcare consumer, I am not interested in that.

There are some aspects of everyday life that will be changed forever because of this pandemic, and the healthcare patient intake process is likely to be one of those things. 

Healthcare organizations have been seeking to incorporate technology into their practice for a while, and the need to move care online due to the pandemic has accelerated these plans. Healthcare organizations want to give their staff more time to focus on patient-centric needs, and patients expect technology infused into their healthcare. I expect this. I can order groceries online, I can bank online, I can have my dinner delivered to my doorstep within minutes with the touch of a button, and the list goes on. We live in a world that has grown accustomed to having the power of technology in the palm of our hand, and it would only make sense that I could engage with my healthcare provider online. This is where Interlace Health steps in. 

My role as a Solution Architect at Interlace Health is to talk with healthcare organizations, understand their needs, and work with them to find the best solution to meet those needs. I connect with hospitals and health systems of all sizes, who are all striving to engage patients safely, and remotely through technology. It is exciting to be a part of this innovation and hear perspectives from people in various roles across different areas of healthcare organizations. I wanted to share some insight I recently gathered from conversations with a few healthcare professionals here. 

  • This fall, I spoke with a Director of Patient Registration at a mid-sized health system. She was focused on reducing patient wait times. She said it can take anywhere from 6 to 15 minutes to register each patient in their ambulatory clinics and the patients need to complete up to 9 forms, 11 if they have Medicare. They see about 350 patients per day at their clinics, that is a lot of time and a lot of paper. Her team was very excited to see Interlace Health’s Remote Patient Intake Solution. Empowering patients to complete their registration forms remotely, before their appointment, saves patients and staff time, increases patient satisfaction and safety, and of course, eliminates printing paper and shared surfaces in the clinic. In fact, hospitals that implement a pre-registration process have seen a 60% reduction in patient wait times. 
  • Reducing wait times is just one of the advantages of remote patient intake, and the ability to text patients takes that a step further. The IT Director at a regional medical center loved Interlace Health’s ability to have no-contact registration and enable patients to bypass the waiting room all together with the option to send text messages to patients. He saw many advantages in the ability to allow patients to wait in their car and send a text when their exam room is ready. 
  • At another larger hospital I met with, the Patient Access Manager asked about collecting insurance information and co-payments in advance of the appointment. Their current-state workflow was calling the patient to collect the payment or having the patient sign a form saying they promise to pay. This often placed staff members in uncomfortable situations. They were intrigued to see that our solution lets the patient upload a photo of their insurance card and submit their co-payment at their convenience, any time before the visit. Surveys have found that 83% of patients prefer to pay their bills online.

The advantages of infusing technology and patient engagement into healthcare extend far beyond the necessity that stemmed from the pandemic. While the pandemic may have fast-tracked the digital patient intake process, it also brought to light the many benefits and the realization there is no going back. It is exciting to be a part of the work being done at Interlace Health to ease the process of transitioning to a remote patient intake process and drive real results for staff and their patients. 

 

For more information on a zero-contact registration process, download our whitepaper. 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Ellie Silver is a Solution Architect at Interlace Health. In this role, Ellie provides expertise to healthcare organizations, incorporating Interlace Health solutions, services, and integration technologies to help optimize workflows for patients, providers, and staff. Her degree in Health Science combined with her experience as a Project Manager and End User Trainer enhances her abilities as an innovator in the healthcare IT industry. Ellie is enthusiastic about healthcare and is passionate about helping healthcare organizations create continuous success.

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