Practice Fusion, the cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) for doctors and patients, unveiled new Online Patient Check-In service to the market, allowing patients to complete traditional check-in forms from their phones, tablets, or computers before getting to the doctor’s office. By digitizing this part of the patient’s office visit experience, the company is freeing patients from what is considered to be the most redundant and cumbersome part of the visit with their doctor.
On the other hand, this technology allows doctors to review their patients’ issues before their visit, giving them the opportunity to have meaningful one-on-one conversations with their patients during their time in person. In addition, it also eliminates error-prone re-keying of hundreds of pages of intake forms by front office staff daily.
A patient can provide medical history, demographics, insurance information, and reasons for the visit in an online form, which is then automatically provided to the doctor for review and incorporated into the patient’s record within the Practice Fusion EHR. Doctors also have the ability to customize the check-in with questions specific to their practice, as well as specialty specific questions.
“As a result of the delivery of this functionality, we will eliminate the need for our patients to fill-out hundreds of millions of pages of paper forms over the next year, and more importantly, make sure that this valuable face-to-face time is devoted to talking with a patient about exactly what that patient wants to discuss about their health concerns,” said Ryan Howard, founder and CEO, Practice Fusion.
On average, a physician waits just 18 seconds before asking questions during their patients’ visits, which rarely is enough time for patients to finish explaining their symptoms. With a recent study showing that “three in ten sick Americans say that a doctor, nurse, or other health professional did not spend enough time with them,” every second of the encounter is crucial for patient-provider communication.