Patient Intake Process Essay

The patient intake process, simply said, is the process of taking information to establish new patients into your facility. This process is almost never the same between facilities, however no matter how it is done, it is very time consuming. The process can also involve updating already established patient’s information. You do this simply by reviewing their information with them to make sure that it is all the same. Once they are finished providing you with any new or updated information it will need to be entered manually into your computer system for future reference. All new patients will have multiple forms and consents to complete before they are able to visit with that physician. These forms mainly consist of their demographic
information, personal information such as age, gender, family health background, insurance information, and more. Once you fully understand the intake process and all that it requires you see ways that it could possibly be improved. After they are finished with the paperwork it will need to be entered into the computer system and filed into their new folder.

After looking back at the information that I have learned so far in this class and my past HCR class I feel that it the more diverse responsibilities the staff has the more mistakes that are made.
When I worked at a medium size facility as a secretary on the medical/surgical/pediatrics I noticed that the nurses had so many jobs. They were expected to take care of the patient, enter full notes, fill out a Kardx (paper based information system for all nurses) admit their patients, discharge their patients, contact doctors for any consultations, and more. To me, this is way too much for a nurse to do. Nurses are our primary care givers at a hospital. Most doctors visit once to twice during a stay and the rest of the time our lives are in our nurse’s care. When your nurse has 1,000 tasks on her plate how is she supposed to give you her full care? I feel that if it is this way at one hospital it is this way at more than one hospital! Because of this, if I was to change something with the patient intake process I would change the load that everyone carries. I feel that the work load on nurses should be professionally evaluated and cleared by the boards. The work load of nurses being lightened is going to put more work onto the patient intake process. I feel that that should be fine as long as the system that you have in place is already running
smoothly.

The next way that I thought would seriously help with the patient intake process was recently on the Yahoo.com website. It was an app for the Iphone and possibly other smartphone as well. As we all know, and I mentioned above, there can be a lot of paper work that needs to be filled out every time you go to the doctor, hospital, a specialist, and so on. This paper work can quite a while for each patient to fill out. From what I understand this app will allow you to fill out all necessary paperwork on your phone, download them to your home computer and print them to take them with you or even email them to your physician’s office. If the patient does not have a smart phone the office would be able to provide them with other choices. One of the other choices is that the office can simply email them the paperwork. If the patient does not have access to a computer or to the internet there can also be the option of the office clerks calling the patient prior to their visit so that they can have the same fast and easy doctor visit as the others.

I believe that the patient intake process can sometime me frustrating. Knowing that you have to go to the doctor office to begin with can be stressful and knowing that you have tons of paperwork to full out when you get there can sometimes make it worse. By having these papers and consents on