From the September 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
By Chris Byers
Every health care facility has countless tasks that need to be accomplished on a daily basis.
Patients need to be registered, scheduled for appointments, prescribed medication and slated for surgeries. Office staff must process paperwork, handle billing, get patient consent for record releases and fill out equipment requests. The work never ends, and there is so much room for error.
According to HIMSS, 86 percent of mistakes made in the health care industry are administrative, costing organizations over $19.5 billion per year. This extraordinary cost is why many facilities have begun moving toward automation technology to make common processes faster, more accurate and efficient. However, the health care industry has been slower than most when it comes to automation adoption, and some facilities still need to catch up. If your organization hasn’t fully embraced automation yet, here are three factors you should consider:
Frequent paperwork errors
Nothing is more frustrating than having to do something over again because it wasn’t done correctly the first time. Incorrect information is a common issue when it comes to processing paperwork. Patient handwriting can be hard to decipher, and it’s easy to make the occasional error while processing paper forms during busy waiting room times. Unfortunately, in the health care industry, a simple paperwork error can be deadly. According to a recent study, medical errors contribute to over 200,000 patient deaths every year.
In order to eliminate these high-cost errors, consider replacing your paper-based processes with online forms and other health care automation tools to ensure your patients get the proper care they need in a timely manner. This can also improve patient satisfaction, since your patients won’t have to worry about filling out stacks of paper forms every time they visit your office. Instead, you can use online forms to collect patient information before a visit and create a positive first impression of your facility.
HIPAA-compliant online forms also come with a lot of extra benefits, including easy customization, multiple field types (like electronic signatures) and confirmation emails that can be sent to patients or staff upon submission.
Disorganized or misplaced information
Paper-based systems cause problems that reach beyond simple data entry errors. Filling out a paper form and transferring the data to your database is tedious enough. To make matters worse, the systems used to store collected information are often disorganized and disjointed.
