Digital intake with scored assessments
New patients at a multi-site primary care group filled in a paper intake packet at the front desk, and the answers were read once and lost in a file. The clinic now sends intake, consent and three scored assessments as one task list, and the answers stay in the record for anyone who needs them.
Clinical Challenge
A primary care group came to us because its new patient intake still ran on paper. Patients arrived early to fill in the intake packet at the front desk, signed the consent form on the same clipboard, and were handed the screening questionnaires their clinicians wanted answered whenever the front desk had time. The clinic asked its EHR vendor for a digital version. The vendor could build the forms and the assessments but would not score them or raise an alert when a result came back urgent, and the work sat six months down a waiting list at a price the clinic did not want to pay.
In this particular primary care group, a completed questionnaire was read once by the physician who worked out what it meant in the room with the patient. After the visit, the paper then went into a file and, inconsistently, into the chart as a scanned image. Finding past assessments was a chore at best, and not possible at worst. The primary care group is part of a research institute and the data it wanted to study and publish required manual collection and data entry into spreadsheets, which makes for resource-heavy projects on very slim budgets.
Impact
Answers arrive too late
The patient fills in the form in the waiting room, and an urgent result reaches clinical staff after the visit has started.
Paper that goes nowhere
Every packet is filed and scanned, and putting the answers to any other use means typing them out again.
No numbers to analyze
Results sit in the chart as an image or a narrative note, never as fields a clinician or a researcher can add up.
“I have stacks of paper forms from patients that have valuable information but no reasonable way to use them.”
Physician, multi-site primary care group
Clinical Solution
The primary care team and EVAL reviewed the existing EVAL Community library of digital instruments and determined that the only digital tool that needed to be built was a patient intake form with legal consent signature. The ACE-Q, PHQ-9 and GAD-7 were already built to the satisfaction of the clinic.
Within six hours over the course of three days, EVAL and the primary care clinic head nurse built the patient intake form and tested it with simulated patients. Once the intake form was done, EVAL and the primary care team configured the ACE-Q, PHQ-9, and GAD-7 to send notifications to the clinical team when urgent results were sent in, and then trained the primary care clinic on how to schedule the intake packet (intake form, ACE-Q, PHQ-9, GAD-7) for new patients when their appointment is created.
The end result is that the clinical staff often receive the intake information prior to the patient arriving in the clinic, and are able to send a text message to patients in the waiting room to complete the intake packet on their own device. With results flowing in digitally and scored automatically, staff are alerted instantly and the entire clinical team is able to monitor patients and react more quickly.
Patient results are now stored for quick access in the patient chart and ready for downstream analytics with the click of a download button. No IT support required, which is good for IT and for the clinicians.
The new patient appointment is booked
Scheduling books the visit for the following week, launches EVAL from the patient chart, and schedules the intake packet to be sent digitally per the patient's consent.
The packet invite is sent via text
EVAL sends a simple text message to the patient to click a secure no-password link to start completing the intake packet, including the intake forms, consent, and assessments.
Your clinic has sent you a few things to finish before your visit next Tuesday.
me.eval.health/7f3b91
The consent is signed on the phone
The consent form is a task like the others, and the patient signs it before moving on. The signed copy is stored with the rest of the patient's record.
I authorize the clinic to provide treatment and to release information for billing.
Jane DoeThe assessment results are sent immediately and alert the team
Patient answers are submitted immediately, scored, and associated with the patient record. The clinical team creates their own alert thresholds and where the urgent alerts are sent for the team to receive.
The visit opens with the paperwork done
The physician reads the scores before walking in, and the appointment starts on time with the whole history already in the chart.
The institute charts the collected scores
Every score is stored as a field rather than an image, so the research team can chart one patient over time or the whole population at once. Data can be downloaded into a statistical analysis platform independently without a request from IT.