How Automated Patient Intake Improves Your Ophthalmology Check-in Process

Updated June 20, 2024 | By Blakely Roth

Improving your patient check-in system doesn’t just have the potential to reduce wait times, it also helps patients spend less time filling in paperwork, reduces registration errors, builds trust, and can relieve your front office staff of unneeded stress.

Keep reading to learn how digital automated patient intake tools can improve your ophthalmology check-in process!

What is Pre-Check?

In addition to patient self-registration at your ophthalmology office, pre-registration is a simple, effective solution that allows patients to pre-register and complete patient intake for their appointments before arriving at your office. Here’s how it works:

• Patients receive an automated text or email reminder to check in for their appointment, which includes a link to confirm.
• Through the same link, patients are asked to verify contact, demographic and insurance information, making updates if needed. They can also respond to consents and complete medical history forms and updates – all prior to their appointment.
• Patients can then complete clinical intake, including medical history all digitally. Patients will complete clinical intake as the last step in pre-registrsation and their information will instantly flow into your EHR/PMS, either by PDF or discrete data field updates.
• When arriving for their appointment, patients simply verify their arrival at patient check-in by Clearwave Registration for Mobile, Kiosk or Tablet and alert staff that they have arrived.

Why do you need pre-registration at your practice? The benefits of a simple patient check-in solution like Clearwave Pre-Registration are numerous for any ophthalmology practice, and help provide customization and convenience to your staff and patients.

More Time for Ophthalmology Care, Not Paperwork

Gone are the days of tedious paperwork given to patients 15-30 minutes before their appointment time. Pre-Check allows patients to pre-register for their vision appointment from anywhere using their phone, computer or tablet. This reduces bottlenecks caused by patients filling out paperwork in the office, which can snowball into a string of delayed appointments.

Imagine if 60% of your patients completed their initial check in using pre-registration. With results like those, your office staff can spend more time taking care of patient needs and meaningfully engaging with your patient base.

Build Better Patient Experiences

Pre-check can support a healthy patient relationship by gathering accurate data and eliminating common registration errors and patient frustration. When automated patient intake is combined with real-time verification of both medical and vision insurance information, it can reduce ophthalmology data errors by up to 90%.

Going digital also leads to better organization and flow of information. Updates to patient information that are captured from a patient check in tablet, kiosk, or using mobile pre-check can be transferred directly into your Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for automatic updates, reducing duplicate entry. When registration errors occur that can impact vision insurance claims, this can have a negative impact on patient trust. Patients take comfort in knowing their records have been captured accurately, and that information is seamlessly updated throughout your internal systems.

Patient trust can also be built with enhanced patient communication. According to the Healthcare Guys:

“A self-service check-in process opens the door to more meaningful communication with patients not just by freeing up staff time, but also by improving throughput. For example, nurses and physicians are better able to share information about additional services the patient may wish to consider. Staff can then augment these conversations by providing patients with brochures that offer greater detail about these services. Staff time also can be spent on patient follow up, making sure discharge instructions are clear and future appointments are scheduled.”

Whether you are an optometrist or an ophthalmologist, your patients place their trust in you each time they come to your office. By reducing errors and improving communication, the level of trust your patients place in you can only improve, and Pre-Check can support these efforts.

Reduce Patient No-Shows

With a mobile patient check in system that allows you to send appointment reminders via text and email, you can give your eye care patients the gentle prod they need to recall and arrive at their upcoming eye exam, consultation, or appointment.

From the National Center for Biotechnology Information:

“The act of simply sending a reminder may increase patient perceptions of the value of the appointment. Patients have also reported that receiving a reminder felt like a proactive, positive contact with the health-care provider, which left them feeling that their health-care provider was genuinely concerned about their health problem.”

With Clearwave Pre-Check, you can send appointment reminders via text message or email. This can also reduce staff time spent leaving voicemails for each patient appointment.

According to Science Direct, “SMS-reminder studies helped improve patient medical compliance and appointment reminders. Additionally, researchers reported numerous benefits from using SMS reminders, including ease of use, relative inexpensiveness, and rapid and automated message delivery.”

Whether you’re sending appointment reminders through email, text messages, or both, these are excellent ways to make the most of everything Pre-Check has to offer your patients. Reducing no shows can increase practice revenue and allow for efficient scheduling updates when a patient is unable to make an appointment, allowing you to fill otherwise lost appointment slots.

Want to learn more about how no shows impact your medical office? Check out our recent blog, ‘Is Your Practice Losing Money Because of No Shows?’.

Implement Pre-Check at Your Ophthalmology Practice

Are you ready to learn what Pre-Check could help achieve at your eye care practice? From a more efficient check in system to increase patient satisfaction, it’s clear that this innovative technology can help improve your check in process and enhance operations.

Schedule a 30-minute demo with Clearwave today and see what our patient check in solutions for ophthalmology can do for you!