Understanding the Patient Intake Process – Essay

Although, there are ways to make it easier for both the patient and the medical billing specialist and that is to use online registration. However, let us discuss the current process first. Although, the actual process may vary from practice to practice, the main objective behind the process is to obtain Information from new and established patients while he/she Is checking In at the practitioner’s office, the hospital, or health clinic. Patient flow can be maintained if the medical practice implements an effective intake process.

The intake process is just as important in serving satisfied customers as how he/she are treated during the process, time waiting in the waiting room to be taken back to the exam room, and time spent with the physician. If any of the processes are caking in organization, there will be unsatisfied customers, or patients, which, in turn, leads to less customers, or patients, that the physician administers treatment to. The process begins before the patient ever steps foot inside the practitioners office.

As soon as the patient calls the office to make an appointment the intake process begins because when a patient calls to make an appointment, the individual in charge of scheduling usually gathers the person’s full name, telephone number, address, date of birth, gender, reason for the appointment, the name of the health Lana (If the patient has knob and the name of the referring physician (If the patient Is referred) (Valueless, Bases, Newbie, & Gaggers, Chapter 3-Patient Encounters and Billing Information, 2008).

Then the office employee schedules the patient for the appropriate amount of time according to the reason for the visit. When the patient comes into the office the day of the appointment, if he/she is a new patient, he/she must come in early to fill out paperwork.

One way that this can be made easier for patients, as well as medical staff, is for the medical practice to have online registration available to the patients. Online registration is a tool used by medical facilities to allow patients to register his/her billing and medical information before coming into the office for the first time. Because the patients are responsible for filling out the registration, there are fewer errors and less work for he staff member responsible for putting the information into the computer program. Furthermore, the patients look at it as a convenience (Sporran Solutions, 2011). Patients view this as a convenience because it enables him/her to fill out their information on his/her own time- at any time day or night.

So, instead of having to fill out the information when he/she arrives at the office, he/she can fill it out beforehand and have less time spent in the waiting room (Sporran Solutions, 2011). Online registration also enables medical staff to receive and chart information more accurately and efficiently. So how does it work? When the patient calls to make his/ her first appointment the staff member that he/she is talking to tells him/her that they are able to register online before their first appointment (Sporran Solutions, 2011). The patient fills out the information and once it is completed the staff member can put it into the system, print it, and prepare the patient chart before the visit; physician reviews medical history more quickly (Sporran Solutions, 2011).