Letting the right technology help your practice minimize risk and create a safer practice environment .
In response to COVID-19, the CDC issued numerous recommendations and guidelines, including screening for COVID-19, reducing contact in waiting rooms, and introducing curbside and telehealth services.
Specific to waiting rooms, they guide practices to “consider asking patients waiting to be seen to remain outside (e.g., stay in their vehicles, if applicable) until they are called into the facility for their appointment or set up triage booths to screen patients safely”.
While practices re-think waiting rooms to minimize risk and create a safer practice environment, now is the time to use technology to eliminate waiting rooms completely, improve efficiency and create a new model of care.
As consumers, we demand convenience from the places that get our business and healthcare is no different. As consumer demands change – healthcare has to change too.
Beyond safety, a contactless check-in process helps eliminate dirty clipboards, piles of papers and an unpleasant waiting room experience that impacts both patients and staff.
Ready to change all that? Here are three ways your practice can implement a contactless check-in process:
Secure Text
Text messaging is a vital communications tool for many in the U.S. In fact, 97% of Americans use text messaging. People are not likely to answer a phone call from a number they don’t know and this is true for your patients as well. Secure Texting reduces hours that staff may spend playing phone tag and enables them to interact with patients by engaging them where they are—on their phones.
Electronic Forms for Contactless Experiences
Paper forms can be costly to print, slow to complete, illegible or incomplete and often lead to follow-up questions. They also require manual input from paper form to computer. That’s time your staff might better spend on other tasks. The result: often inaccurate information and delayed processes. Plus, administrative staff have to clean pens and clipboards between handoffs.
Electronic Forms are a critical next step to going paperless and optimizing virtual care. Online medical forms let providers eliminate the risk of human error, enhance document availability and increase patient satisfaction with easily accessible online and mobile friendly, simple data entry options. Pharmacies can also leverage electronic forms to create touchless drive through flu shots or other vaccines.
Virtual Waiting Rooms
According to a recent report, unpleasant waiting rooms are a single-most cited reason patients wouldn’t return to a healthcare facility. In an era where convenience and safety are paramount, virtual waiting rooms are becoming important to creating a more pleasant experience for both telehealth and in-person visits. With contactless patient intake solutions, patients can check-in via their smartphone and be directed at the appropriate time straight from their car to the evaluation room – eliminating inefficiencies, unnecessary wait times, and the need to linger in crowded waiting rooms.
