Technology of Digitized Patient Intake Forms

It feels like a twentieth-century school exercise in penmanship, not a professional office visit. Where else but the doctor’s office are we asked to come fifteen minutes early to fill out a form with pen or pencil, especially when the information is usually already on record?

A major goal of clinicians now is to replace paper with convenient forms that patients can fill out on mobile devices at home. I covered the trend in my recent article Patient scheduling and pre-visit intake: Let’s give patients what they’re asking for. Recently I got more details about the technology behind online healthcare forms from managers at Weave.

How Weave Helps Automate Forms

Forms are part of Weave’s digital communication platform, which automates several aspects of patient interaction including scheduling, payments, and charges to insurers. Figure 1 shows a registration form.

The registration form for a clinical visit allows the patient to edit information such as name, birthdate, and gender.
Figure 1: Registration form for a clinical visit

I talked to Cam Holt, director of product at Weave. He says that forms can be created through a drag-and-drop interface, similar to creating surveys on the popular SurveyMonkey platform.

Weave also provides templates for common forms such as health histories. Each part of a question is stored in a hierarchical tree of JSON objects. Figure 2 shows typical forms.

Common forms include child registration, COVID patient screening, etc.
Figure 2: Templates for common forms

Before a visit, the Weave platform sends forms to a patient and validates the patient by asking a few questions, no password required (Figure 3). Multiple forms can be compiled into a packet.

The contact information form asks for phone numbers, etc.
Figure 3: Asking for contact information

The contact information form asks for phone numbers, etc.

The forms are designed in accordance with the common web programming techniques know as responsive interfaces. Thus, the forms work just as well on mobile phone screens as on a desktop. But forms can also be optimized for different devices.

Information that is already in the record at the clinic is use to prepopulate fields. When the patient enters fresh data, autocompletion works on fields whose content is predictable.

A patient who loses or fails to fill out the form before the visit can scan a QR code when they get to the clinic and fill out the form there.

At the back end, data from the forms have to enter the patient’s record, which is easier to do with some EHRs than others. “APIs are our friend,” says Holt, because Weave can simply call appropriate API endpoints instead of worrying about the format of the data at the vendor’s side. Weave has formed strong partnerships with EHR vendors.

Each clinical practice can determine how much validation to do before pushing it into the EHR, and have fine-grained control over which fields are entered.

Making Life Easier for Office Staff

When we talk about the patient experience, we often forget that automation and streamlined workflows lead to a happier workforce too—a critical factor in our time where we see a massive exodus from the health field.

Todd Snyder, a cosmetic dentist and international lecturer, described the convenience that automated forms offer to office staff. Not only are they spared the tedium of entering information by hand into their records, but they receive alerts if a patient has failed to fill out some information.

Chris Baird, chief marketing officer at Weave, says that 82% of clinical staff surveyed find that digital forms make it easier to serve patients.

Reduced errors means fewer rejected bills. And finally, when a patient calls, their information is automatically pulled up on the staff person’s screen.

Baird cited some statistics from surveys of their clients:

  • Entering data from a paper form into the system leads to an error 31% of the time.
  • A clinic on average loses 3.6 paper input forms each week, and 77% of clinics spend at least $100 per week shredding and disposing of paper forms.
  • Half of the patients prefer to fill out intake forms at home before a visit, and 58% of patients consider filling out paper intake forms “old fashioned.” One-third of patients would rather give up chocolate for a day than fill out a paper intake form. (Now you know the true extent of their hardship.)

Everyone can recognize the benefits of applying technology to patient forms. This article has shown the techniques used by one company to make it simple.

About the author

Andy Oram

Andy is a writer and editor in the computer field. His editorial projects have ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. A correspondent for Healthcare IT Today, Andy also writes often on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM (Brussels), DebConf, and LibrePlanet. Andy participates in the Association for Computing Machinery's policy organization, named USTPC, and is on the editorial board of the Linux Professional Institute.

   

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