10 Best Strategies to Improve Patient Intake Efficiency

As patient forms are often one of the patient’s first interactions at your practice (and can set the tone for your relationship), you must find ways to improve patient intake efficiency. Even more crucial to your practice, an expedient, automated patient intake process saves your staff time processing patients on their first visit, limits occupants in the waiting room, and simplifies data collection.

Along with helping you choose the best solution to revamp your patient intake process, we will also be discussing the following:

• Why improving patient intake efficiency is so important
• 10 patient intake strategies to streamline patient acquisition and onboarding

Let us start by first understanding how critical the patient intake process is to your practice’s growth.

Why improving patient intake efficiency is so important

The patient intake process is the foundation of building new relationships with your patients. When you receive all the necessary information at the outset with minimum resistance, you can deliver accurate care and incredible service that results in better health outcomes for your patients.

Let us look at why you need to focus your efforts to improve patient intake efficiency at your office:

Now that we understand the importance of patient intake, let’s look at how we can help you achieve it.

10 patient intake strategies to streamline patient acquisition and the patient onboarding process

Your patient intake process is the final step in the acquisition, and it should be treated as such. By treating your onboarding as a stage in customer adoption, you’ll ensure that you give patients an ideal experience - and a reason to stay with your practice.

Here are ways to improve patient intake efficiency at your office:

1. Expedite the onboarding process 

Automating your patient onboarding allows you to streamline the process, making it faster and more efficient. Digital intake forms are faster - and more convenient - for patients to complete, and they can do it at their convenience.

This means you can schedule more appointments in a day, and save your staff several hours of data entry in the process. NexHealth equips your practice with solutions that are designed to deliver a modern patient onboarding process and reclaim time in your day.

3. Offer integrated, HIPAA compliant intake forms

HIPAA compliant intake forms offer your patients the convenience of filling out paperwork from the comfort of their home (and saves the hassle of dealing with actual paperwork). This eliminates the need for your staff to process, file, and manage documents that contain private, protected information about your patients.

With NexHealth’s HIPAA compliant intake forms, your patients can upload selfies, sign digital forms, and upload their insurance details, driver’s licenses, and other necessary documents, which automatically sync with your practice management system and ensure proper compliance and safety standards. Also, using the form builder feature, you can convert existing forms or build new ones with an easy drag-and-drop functionality that allows you to offer digital intake forms in English and Spanish.

4. Offer two-way communication (SMS, email, and more!)

When you offer an open line of communication to your patients, you are letting your patients know that you care about their well-being and how valuable they are to your practice. Understanding that your patients may have different preferences when it comes to modes of communication is key. Thus, as a business, when you offer them secure patient messaging alternatives like SMS and email, you are maximizing your patient access and making your patients feel comfortable under your care.

Text messaging and emails significantly contribute to your marketing efforts and allow you to share announcements about your practice when your patients are ready to listen. NexHealth works as an all-in-one patient communication and management platform with key features like reminders, recalls, secure messaging, and custom marketing campaigns and templates designed to ensure patient engagement.

5. Authorization insurance claims and online payments

Modern patients are well-versed in online payments and will expect this level of convenience. When intaking patients, it’s a good idea to get insurance and payment details, so that you can streamline payment for future treatments. By incorporating this into onboarding, you can save your patients’ (and staff’s!) time on future visits.

NexHealth’s automated text and email messages let your patients make their payments securely without the need to create any login or password; the transaction automatically deposits the funds into your bank account. You are not only offering the convenience of contactless payment and authorizing insurance claims but also saving your staff time and unnecessary paperwork that can be better utilized on tasks that contribute to the growth of your practice.

6. Streamline intake with your EHR practice management system

Having your patient intake seamlessly flow into your practice management and EHR system gives you full control and visibility over your patients’ information. Having this information available at your fingertips is critical to running an efficient practice and achieving your business goals. NexHealth integrates with a wide array of practice management and EHR systems at no additional cost and gives you a full platform extension where you can enter data into your schedule, patient chart, or ledger.

7. Virtual Waitlist

When onboarding new patients, it’s important to showcase the level of care and service that you can offer. What better way to impress a new customer than to get them in for a last-minute, high-priority appointment right after they’ve signed on as a patient?

NexHealth’s ASAP List feature automatically sends outreach to patients via text to fill gaps in your schedule. This gives you a chance to get a new patient in right away if possible, and a chance to impress them. Even better, this saves your staff hours of work, reduces idle hours throughout the day, and eliminates the stress of filling in missed appointments and managing all outbound communication.

8. Measure success and adapt

To steadily improve onboarding, you need to have a clear understanding of all the steps of your intake process. From here, you can identify the points of the intake process that cause the most friction and resistance, allowing you to improve the overall process and make it easier for patients to onboard.

With NexHealth, you get a powerful dashboard that measures the KPIs that matter most to you, and displays this data in a way that is easy for your teams to assess. With these insights, you can paint a clear picture of abandonment during the intake process, helping you close gaps and keep patients from falling through the cracks.

9. Build a strong online reputation

A 2018 NRC Health study found that nearly 60% of patients selected a doctor based on their positive reviews and that the same amount of people avoided a doctor based on negative reviews. With such a heavy reliance on online reviews, it’s more important than ever to constantly monitor what your patients are saying about you online.

To help foster this loyalty, you should be connecting patients with your online presence (social media, email, and other methods of communication) during the onboarding process. Ensure they know how to contact you and where to go for different types of information and updates on your practice.

10. Follow up with patients after their first visit to get them hooked
After your patient's first appointment, you can automate follow-ups to ensure they return to you for their future care. Send patients an appreciation note, thanking them for joining your practice. Include links to your social media accounts and other resources that showcase the value that you offer your new patient.

Another best practice is to integrate patients that drop off into a recall process so that those that abandon during intake are reminded to complete the process. For those that have completed the onboarding process, your task now shifts to retaining your patients and offering incredible care.

Streamline your patient intake process with NexHealth

Staying organized and having a system in place for your patient intake process shows your practice in a good light. NexHealth makes it look so easy with their API that connects to several EHR systems so you can improve patient intake efficiency.

If your practice is ready to take off and welcome patients through your door, book a demo with NexHealth today!