Healthcare organizations seeking to increase operational efficiency and expand the use of electronic health record (EHR) should consider implementing patient self-registration kiosks, writes Mat Waites, CIO of Brentwood, Tenn.-based The Little Clinic, in Modernhealthcare.com.
We made the strategic decision to use patient self-registration kiosks to expedite the registration process for patients and clinicians. Integrating the kiosk with the EHR eliminates the need to manually enter registration data (such as patient demographic information) into the EHR. We developed a Web-based patient registration kiosk application to collect the information that we need from each patient.We then used a workflow automation tool to develop an integration that pushes the patient data from the kiosk database into the EHR. Automating the registration and data transfer process saves us about one hour a day per clinic. Given that the clinics are open up to 72 hours a week, this easily translates to a savings of hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars a month.By integrating systems and automating time-consuming manual work … valuable data become easier to access (and) organizations save hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars. Often, commercial applications, such as EHRs, do not precisely match the business practices of an organization.
The Little Clinic is a healthcare-services company that manages walk-in clinics placed inside retail locations.
