3 Ways to Create a Streamlined Patient Intake Process & Meet Patient Expectations 

By Chloe From Clearwave | August 21, 2024

When it comes to ensuring patient satisfaction today, the experience you provide outside of the exam room is just as important as the care rendered. Your approach to patient intake and check-in is now more important than ever. Are you meeting patient expectations?  

Automating Clinical Intake to Gain an Advantage

High-growth practices are preventing these registration pitfalls and meeting patient demands with digital automated patient intake tools. With this approach, rather than having to arrive at their appointment 15-20 minutes early to fill out paper forms, patients have the option to pre-register and fill out all the necessary demographic and medical history information, including pre-screeners and consents, in advance of their visit – anywhere, at any time. 

Yet, not all digital registration solutions are one in the same. When digital tools aren’t user-friendly, are behind a password wall or require additional staff involvement — patient adoption and satisfaction drop. Additionally, when your patient self-registration tools aren’t being used efficiently, your practice also loses the added benefits of improved data capture and shorter way times. The results? Unhappy patients, increased data errors and claim rejections and overworked staff.  

Here are three ways you can ensure your digital tools truly speed up intake while meeting the demands of today’s patients and saving staff time!

1. Send customized appointment reminders. 

Consider the two main reasons for patient no-shows:  

• Memory: They simply don’t remember they have a visit scheduled. One report even found that 52% of patients who missed their appointments simply forgot.  

• Ease of access: Practices fail to provide an easy way for patients to modify their appointments as needed. When patients are forced to call the office to modify or cancel an appointment, practices are at a higher risk of no-shows. 

Appointment reminders are the go-to solution to avoid these challenges and streamline patient intake, yet without customization, patients may miss their valuable notification or see it as spam and ignore it! Considering practices use reminders to enable patients to pre-registration for their appointments, when patients don’t get the message, it removes a critical step in speeding up patient intake. 

Use a smart, customizable patient reminder tool to boost patient pre-registration rates and even customize message content to ensure the patient shows up at the ideal time. 

Additionally, a smart patient reminder tool will allow practices to choose the best notification type – text, voice, email or a mix – for different patient demographics. For example, many seniors prefer to receive reminders via phone while millennials typically opt for a text message or email. If your reminders aren’t sent in a way that patients want to be reached, they’ll go unread – leading to late arrivals that impact the check-in process, or no-shows that result in missed revenue for the practice.

2. Offer pre-check with clinical intake.

Smart patient reminder tools offer a third benefit: They allow you to include a link for patients to self-register and fill out all the necessary demographic and medical history information in advance of their visit – from the comfort of their own devices. 

Here’s how it works: 

• An appointment reminder is sent to patients via email or text.  

• A pre-check link is embedded within the message. 

• When patients click the link, they are prompted to complete pre-registration and clinical intake digitally. 

• The pre-check links are optimized with clear messaging that boosts patient completion rates. 

• When they arrive for their appointment, the check-in process is expedited and efficient, with minimal staff intervention.  

Patients can arrive closer to their appointment times, enhancing their experience and fostering loyalty. Additionally, relieving front-desk workers of manual data entry boosts employee satisfaction, benefiting both patients, staff and the practice! 

3. Provide self-service patient check-in kiosks.

Patients want ownership and control over their healthcare experiences. Giving them the ability to pre-register is a great way to deliver on these expectations. Complement this with self-service check-in to keep patients in the driver’s seat leading up to their appointment! 

High-growth practices are doing just this by implementing patient check-in kiosks that provide the option to self-check-in, so they don’t have to wait in lines at the office. If your practice leaders are wondering, what are the pros of self-service kiosks in healthcare? See how fast-growing practices are using self-service patient check-in kiosks to drop wait times by 90% and increase collections! They have even reduced the check-in time to less than two minutes! 

One practice CEO recently shared, “We decided to move forward with kiosks. I’ll tell you what, I would never turn back. It has saved so much time on the front desk staff.” Read this practice’s story to see how they created happier patients and staff while speeding up intake and increasing collections. You may be able to drive similar results. 

Medical office check-in kiosks also reduce manual paperwork, allowing patients to enter their information directly to expedite the process, improve data capture and reduce claim rejections. Additionally, by freeing up front desk staff from administrative tasks, check-in kiosks also optimize resource allocation, allowing for more personalized attention to patients. Last but not least, patients appreciate the convenience and control of self-service, resulting in improved satisfaction and engagement. It’s a win for all parties!  

Ready to Streamline Your Patient Intake Process?

A recent patient experience report found 79% of patients place a high importance on timeliness and wait times when deciding if they want to continue to see the same doctor. That same report also reveals 68% of patients considered a “fast check-in process” as important to their in-office experience. With statistics such as these, high-growth practices are taking action. You can follow their lead by digitizing the pre-registration and clinical intake process. Find all the ways you can use Clearwave to not just streamline clinical intake and improve patient retention and reviews in a multitude of ways.