As I visited the various “suites” (that’s what CHIME called their virtual booths) at the CHIME Spring Forum, I saw a lot of great health IT companies. Since I live, eat, breathe, and sleep health IT, there weren’t a lot of surprises, but it’s always great to see old friends. However, when I came across the company Swellbox, I’d never heard of them and was excited to learn more. Plus, they offered ice cream and I never say no to ice cream. Especially when I get a chance to learn about a new company at the same time.
For those not familiar with Swellbox, they provide a digital solution for healthcare organizations to accept patient requests for their medical records (Side Note: They also offer a chatbot for college health which was fun to hear since I started in college health. They even knew of Medicat which was the first EMR I worked on and very few outside of college health know about it). All the HIM professionals out there will be very familiar with the ROI (Release of Information) process. Swellbox provides a solution to digitize this request process.
As happens in many parts of healthcare, the ROI process is often still requested using paper and fax today. That’s true for both the ROI request and the HIM professional providing the medical records to the patients. Although, I will say that most HIM departments are now providing the medical records electronically. However, the request still comes in on paper or fax for many healthcare organizations.
Why are ROI requests still on paper and fax?
The obvious blocker here for most organizations is that this is how they’ve always done it. However, that often only tells part of the story. The bigger part of the story is often that digitizing your ROI request feature is a low priority for many healthcare leaders. In the grand scheme of things, my guess is that many healthcare CIOs couldn’t tell you their ROI process at all. I’m not saying they necessarily should given all of the decisions and projects they have on their plate. However, this illustrates the biggest reason why many ROI requests still reside on paper and fax. It just never becomes a priority for the organization.
That’s where a company like Swellbox comes into play so nicely. They offer a really simple solution that an HIM can implement without having to really burden the IT staff at their organization. Ok, I would never suggest that HIM go and implement a shadow IT solution (or would I?), but a solution like Swellbox is one that’s simple enough for a well organized IT staff to vet quickly (especially the security team) and allow HIM to take the lead on implementing.
You can go and try a demo of the Swellbox wizard yourself. It’s as simple as you’d want an online request form to be and of course they use your current ROI form to create a form that’s unique to your organization. Plus, it has the added benefit of working on mobile devices. In fact, they showed me how organizations using their solution are receiving 40-70% of their patient ROI requests on mobile.
You can imagine that many of those mobile users would have bumped into a PDF on the hospital website when searching for the ROI request form previously. Talk about a bad experience. The Swellbox solution solves the problem of trying to fill out a PDF on mobile with a slick mobile friendly interface that includes things like capturing photo IDs and other form verification. In fact, they told me that many of their HIM users reported higher quality requests because the electronic form essentially forces the patient to complete the form fully and properly. Try doing that on a PDF.
The Swellbox team also demonstrated a great option to be able to text the request form to a phone. While a patient could do this from their desktop to be able to leverage their phone’s camera for ID capture for example, it’s also a really nice feature to allow HIM staff to text the ROI request form to a patient’s mobile device. This has proven particularly valuable for many people who have a cell phone, but don’t have a desktop computer, broadband internet, or a printer to be able to complete a PDF ROI request. Not to mention how important this solution is during COVID when many can’t or don’t want to visit the hospital.
I was also fascinated to hear that Swellbox was asking patients about their experience with the ROI request. It makes sense that they wanted to ensure patients were having a positive experience so they could improve their product. However, they shared that even more valuable was sharing these patient comments and feedback with the HIM staff. It’s no surprise that HIM is often a pretty thankless job. How nice it must be for those HIM professionals to read a positive review like one they shared with me that said “Very helpful staff.” Swellbox is now looking at how they can push those reviews to the various ratings and review sites. Have you ever seen a Google review of a healthcare organization’s HIM staff? I hadn’t…until I talked with Swellbox.
No doubt, those reading this are probably thinking that any developer could build this solution and they’d be right. The problem is that most developers probably didn’t realize how important the ROI request is to a patient. Of course, those people likely haven’t talked to many patients who have had to deal with bad ROI request forms. Let me let a parent who provided this feedback to Swellbox describe why a great ROI experience matters to patients:
Great! More specific and yet simpler way to contact a hospital than most places I’ve ever encountered. I Will be very grateful (and surprised!) if I am able to receive my request for daughter’s documentation of her recent visit to the emergency room within the time frame needed, as these things tended to be big hassles where I used to live!
When you listen to patients, you understand the value of the ROI request. Accessing their health information so they can provide that information to their bevy of doctors to better coordinate their care matters a lot. The last thing they need when they’re trying to survive is a form they have to fax in to obtain their records. Props to Swellbox for providing a simple digital ROI request alternative.
Great article! Thank you John.
Nice discovery!
Very interesting article, thanks for sharing!