The importance of access in healthcare
The first challenge in healthcare — beyond all those hours of training, the years of sacrifice, and the loans you needed to complete medical school — is patient access.
You have your degree, years of experience, and a great practice. But unless you can quickly and reliably attract patients and make it easy for them to obtain care, you may struggle to succeed.
Customer success: The case of Be Well Primary Care
Some practices, of course, serve as models of success when it comes to implementing electronic solutions. Be Well Primary Care of Fort Worth, Texas, for example, has been using healow Sign since March 2023 to reduce the burden of having front-office staff scan patients’ information.
“The way I was introduced was by trying to find just a general solution for so much scanning,” said Miriam Reyes, head of special projects at the practice.
All that scanning can really slow down any practice’s front-office operations. However, it’s also important to understand the patient’s perspective as well.
For patients, having a primary care provider and insurance, while critical, isn’t quite enough. Patients need to be comfortable with accessing the healthcare resources available to them, knowing how and when to contact their doctor, and having the confidence to navigate the medical system successfully.
One key element in that process involves those seemingly simple consents and signatures. In the days when family physicians knew everyone in the community and made house calls, a handshake and a smile were enough.
But today, for purposes of clarity, insurance coverage, patient safety, and reducing liability, practices and patients increasingly rely upon electronic systems, including for consenting to procedures and taking financial responsibility for their care.
Seemingly routine processes can pose major challenges
Obtaining a patient’s consent or signature is simple in theory but can be complex in practice. Imagine a large urban health center with thousands of patients, from many language communities. Within those communities, many patients may have similar names.
On any given day, dozens or even hundreds of patients may arrive seeking care. They may have provided all, some, or none of the preliminary information the practice needs. Suddenly, the front office has a lot of work to do, including checking patients in, updating names and demographics, and determining insurance coverage.
And once the practice has the necessary information, it may need to collect patients’ consents and signatures. That may be easy enough for those in the office, but for the sake of efficiency today’s practices strive to achieve as many of these functions as possible online. After all, efficiency in administration leaves the practice’s personnel better able to focus on care delivery.
By the numbers: Room for improvement
A 2021 study in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine illustrates how challenging it can be to succeed with such seemingly simple procedures. The study looked at data from the 2017-2018 Health Information National Trends Survey, involving nearly 6,800 adults with a wide range of access to care, insurance status, education levels, and English proficiency.
“Patient portals access and use are low,” the study concluded. Indeed, the study uncovered figures that may strike many as surprisingly low in an age where computer use and internet access are often taken for granted. For example:
- 4% of women but only 36.5% of men reported their providers offered them access to their electronic records
- Just 30.2% of women and 23% of men had accessed their own electronic records at any point in the previous year
- More highly educated patients and those with strong English language skills were more likely to use electronic resources to request medication refills, check records, and message their providers, with numbers falling off sharply for those with less education and limited English proficiency
While the study did not address details such as patient signatures and consents, it is clear that patients who aren’t using electronic resources at all (or doing so perhaps once a year) are hardly likely to be e-signing documents.
The good news?
“Once access was achieved,” the study concluded, “use of patient portal functionalities was generally uniform across demographic segments. Facilitating patient portal access and use among all patient populations is warranted.”
Be Well Primary Care: Reducing the backlog of paperwork
For Miriam Reyes at Be Well Primary Care, the need for better technology was immediately clear. She had noticed that staff members would scan patient information throughout the day, creating a backlog of administrative work.
“So, I wanted to reduce that amount of scanning, because we are advancing in technology and we want to do more electronic stuff versus having the patient fill out a form,” she said.
Obtaining A+ results
By implementing healow Sign, Be Well was able to reduce the amount of scanning staff must perform and cut down on the time patients must wait in the practice’s lobby.
So, 95% of our patients that come in through the door are — whether they are established patients or new patients, have already filled out all the forms,” added Adrianna Garcia, front-office lead at Be Well. “The 5% who have not usually either have not had a change to look at the email or have just not opened up the text message with the forms in there.”
And Be Well didn’t stop there. By using healow Connect and the in-office Kiosk they are able to cover nearly every aspect of previsit planning, from consent forms, forms, and questionnaires to updating medical histories, medications, and allergies.
“We do also have patients that will forget to put someone on the HIPAA form, and we have family members or relatives calling and asking for information,” Garcia said. “It’s always very easy for us to just send a message and have them fill out the HIPAA form. It comes directly to us, and within less than 20 minutes we’re on the phone with that other person communicating what needs to be communicated to them.”
For Be Well Primary Care, healow solutions has been a triple win: Less scanning, complete and accurate HIPAA forms, and nearly all patients having completed their forms before their visits, many through electronic signatures.
“Having healow Sign, healow Connect, and the eClinicalWorks Kiosk has really improved our practice and the patient satisfaction,” Garcia concluded. “I would recommend any of those three services if not all three combined.”
healow Sign: How it works
- Patients are notified by e-mail and SMS message to complete a verification check that allows them to view complete and electronically submit a consent form.
- Practices have access to an activity panel that allows them to see all the healow Sign forms that patients have received completed and turned to the practice.
- Practices can access their responses queue that shows all the healow Sign forms that have been submitted by your patients and the status of each.
- Practices can do analytics including month to month comparisons of how many surveys were opened and completed with a breakdown of use by gender and age.
- For security purposes, patients verify their date of birth and phone number to receive a one-time passcode that allows them to access documents to sign.
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