Easy Ways into Optimising Veterinary Healthcare: How to Digitise Admission Forms.

Move to a digital workflow to improve patient care and quality. Hospitals have been shown to minimise the risk of errors and optimise the workflow with digital processes. This allows patient outcomes to improve by promoting time efficiency and quality of care. Healthcare professionals and veterinarians can spend more time informing pet owners about their pet’s conditions and less time on long administration tasks.
 
Why Go Digital 

There are many benefits to making the admission process digital. See how your veterinary clinic will succeed in their standard of care. 

Efficiency

Electronic content management systems and workflow technologies can improve clinical efficiency. It can reduce time in comparison to traditional paperwork. The digital process in a clinical study (Cunha de Oliveira, Pigozzo et al, 2020) took a range between 6.65 to 20 minutes to be completed compared to conventional time of 11.7 to 28.47 minutes. How might this be? 

- Saving time downloading, printing, and scanning.
- More time to educate clients, providing better care to pets.
- Records and files can be stored digitally, reducing space and time searching for patient files and history.
- Files digitally are accessed immediately. 
- Paper workload is reduced. 

Quality

Quality of work will succeed with more digital processes. Developing more time to spend with patients and improving clinical procedures. This will appear in results below: 

- Increases patient compliance.
- Decreases hospital risk of errors. 
- Prevents miscommunication with staff. 
- Patient information is clearly understood.  
- Procedure changes can be done in advance.
- Better data representation, infographics.
- Improved patient security with hospital or vet clinic authorisation.

Service

Converting the admissions process to a digital platform will increase customer satisfaction and communication. Customers can access administration forms prior to hospital visits and reduce time spent at clinics. The improvement in customer service will increase from 5%-25% (Dunn, 2015). This builds client trust and promotes cost savings. 


How to start

1.   Plan and generate your admission forms.

To begin this process of digitalisation, consent forms and other vet clinic forms must be created. The templates used to create these forms must include an appropriate layout 

- Patient details/profile
- Logo and branding
- Signatures
- Simple layout, appropriate to the form type
- Colours and fonts consistent with branding 
- Consent workflows

Veterinary clinics have a number of admission workflows from sharing forms remotely to completing them in clinic. Choosing a digital form system that allows for this flexibility can help your team get onboard quickly.

2.   Regulatory and Legal Review

Digital pet forms will form part of your legal pet record. Only forms that are reviewed by a legal practitioner can be considered legally reviewed. This will keep patient data secure

3.   Using e-signatures.

Using e-signatures ensures up to date forms which will prevent a loss of documents via email. Signatures can be done by the click of a button, making it fast and easy.

4.   Making payments

Add payment details for clients to access digitally. This will make payment methods more convenient for clients. You can simply add payment gateway links to your forms which can help streamline payments

5.   Storage

Digital storage can be kept in one secure place to store all admission forms. The storage should also provide deep search abilities to make finding admission forms later easier. Digital forms are less heavy on the server as compared with PDFs that can be heavy files of 2MB and more per document.

6.   Analysation

Ensure to keep analysing data to improve organisations data collection. With an electronic workflow this makes data analyzation easy. Forms should also be easy to use by clients. Improve your data with mandatory and locked fields to help capture all the information you need. 

7.   Sending and publishing

Make your administration forms easily accessible via website or QR code. When sending forms via email ensure that patience contact information is current and correct. Have documents located in practice management systems for vet clinics. Send reminders to clients 24 hours prior to visiting the vet to better the customer experience. 

8.   Attachments

Use forms that can integrate attachments, PDFs, images e.g. itemised estimates

What forms should be digitalised? 

Any forms can be digitised in the veterinary clinic. 

Here some more commonly used forms:

- New client forms
- Consent forms
- Prescription refills
- Medical record releases
- Certificates: vaccinations, puppy health
- Questionnaires: behaviour, allergy, and annual health check
- Patient surveys
- Pet reports
- Marketing forms


Create a more efficient work environment by making your workplace digital, saving  time, money and resources. Standard of care will succeed and provide a better patient experience. 





References

Cunha de Oliveira NR, Pigozzo MN et al. 2020. Clinical efficiency and patient preference of digital and conventional workflow for single implant crowns using immediate and regular digital impression: a meta-analysis. Clin Oral Implants Res. 31(8)669-686.

Digital health snapshot. 2022. Australian institute of health and welfare. 
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/digital-health

Dunn G. 2015. Paperless technology and process improvement white paper. Cre8 Inc. Independent Consultants. (206):4-9. 
 
Raymund JA. 2019. Use of content management systems to address nursing workflow. Int J Nurs Sci. 6(4):454-459.