Patient Kiosk – Why Your Practice Needs It

Patient kiosks make check-in faster, easier, and seamless.

Patient check-in kiosks offer clinics, practices, and patient service centers a better way to serve their patients and streamline their practice operations.  In this article, we’ll cover the main workflows patient kiosks help automate, key benefits of patient kiosks, and specific features healthcare facilities should consider when looking to deploy patient-facing kiosks.

First, let’s start with the basics.

What is a patient kiosk?
A patient kiosk acts as a digital front door to patient-facing experiences. Unlike the standard patient intake process, whereby a staff member hands you a clipboard with several forms for you to fill out, patient kiosks offer patients the option to complete their intake process digitally. In addition, they also free up staff to focus on higher-value interactions.

What is a patient intake workflow?
Simply put, the patient intake workflow is the series of steps that patients and staff need to complete in order to successfully enter all the data necessary for new and returning patients prior to their visit with medical staff.

Next, let’s take a look at how patient kiosks can improve the patient intake process.

Patient kiosks streamline the intake process

The patient intake process for many healthcare organizations is still plagued by manual, time-consuming tasks, redundant processes, and a lack of personalization. As mentioned in our article on how to eliminate paper forms, patient intake documentation can range from one to six pages or more depending on the amount of information the practice needs to obtain. Not only does this slow the process down, but traditional paper intake forms are also prone to errors, making it harder for both patients and medical staff.

In contrast, patient kiosks offer patients a digital option to check themselves in, eliminating paper forms and streamlining the intake process. Rather than paper intake forms, patients can simply walk up to the patient kiosk and complete virtually all of the patient check-in tasks from one digital touchpoint.

By integrating scanning into the patient check-in workflow, practices make it even easier for patients to check themselves in while improving data accuracy and decreasing wait times.  Aila’s Interactive Kiosk, for example,  allows practices to automate the check-in process by leveraging image-based scanning into their patient intake workflows. Patients can use their smartphone to scan a QR code, ID such as a driver’s license and/or their medical card to check themselves into their appointment — all within seconds.

Moreover, no patient information is stored on the iPad or Interactive Kiosk. Our scanning SDK easily integrates with iOS-friendly patient engagement apps to pass the information captured from the scan directly into your app and into your preferred EMR/EHR platform.

With the addition of verification software like Acuant, patient kiosks can also authenticate and verify patient IDs quickly and securely.

Key benefits of Patient Kiosks

Providing an efficient, streamlined intake process with patient kiosks like Aila’s Interactive Kiosk results in faster throughput, lower overall costs, and improved patient satisfaction. Paired with your patient engagement applications, Aila’s InteractiveKiosk with image-based scanning automates the entire patient intake process, reduces the duplicative and cumbersome tasks staff are required to perform and improves collection rates.

Key benefits include:

• Eliminating manual data entry dramatically reduces the clerical burden on staff
• Replacing keystrokes with scanning and form autofill, ensuring the accuracy of patient information
• Collect accurate and complete insurance and ID information, leading to fewer claim rejections, while enabling self-service copayments at the point of check-in
• Enable faster patient processing without additional staffing

Choosing the right patient kiosk for your practice

When trying to decide which patient kiosk is right for your practice, it’s important to take into consideration your patient’s preferences as well as the components it will take to develop and deploy your ideal patient-facing experience. As with any technology rollout, you’ll also want your patient kiosk to be secure, stay modern, and require minimum effort to deploy and maintain.

Here are a few tips that can help you choose the right patient kiosk:

Avoid single-purpose systems

Many top healthcare providers find that consumer tablets like iPads are more intuitive for patients to use, easier to deploy and support, and cost significantly less than legacy systems over the course of the deployment lifetime. With the right hardware and software, these iPad-based kiosks can serve a multitude of use cases across healthcare facilities and pharmacies and are years ahead of alternative technologies. With iOS-based kiosks healthcare providers can also easily add more digital touchpoints across their locations on a unified platform, avoiding disjointed experiences that are harder and become expensive to maintain.

Ensure your patient kiosk is flexible and can scale with your needs

As with single-purpose systems, many patient kiosk providers are limited by important features such as processing power, security,  scanning, size, mounting options, and ability to work with software applications and other devices such as printers, scanners, and payment systems. It’s easier and more cost-effective to invest in technology that can be updated with top peripherals and can work with different software applications.

Patient kiosks that feature integrated scanning, power hub, SDK, and work with leading peripheral providers make it dramatically easier to keep your intake process flowing smoothly for a modern today and tomorrow deployment.

Pilot an enterprise-grade iPad-based kiosk

As mentioned, by leveraging consumer technology such as iPads, practices can more easily deploy patient kiosks that leverage the superior power and user experiences that iOS offers and that patients and staff are already familiar with and prefer.

Built exclusively for iOS, Aila’s Interactive Kiosk leverages the industry-leading security, processing power, camera resolution, and the superior user experience of iPads and harnesses that power through hardware that both secures the iPad and provides powerful image-based scanning capabilities.

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With thousands of kiosks deployed worldwide, Aila’s Interactive Kiosk is built to easily handle high-volume transactions and scale with your business.  To find out if Aila’s Interactive Kiosk is the right solution for your patient kiosk, contact sales to request a demo. Whether in your lab or in the field, getting hands-on experience with your patient kiosk can help ensure that it’s the right solution for your healthcare facility and pharmacy.