How Mobile Check-In Can Enhance the Patient Experience

In recent years, mobile check in services have advanced to the point where they can do more than save your employees time — they can help improve the patient experience and your overall practice efficiency. Here’s how.

Reducing Paperwork and Check-In Times

Imagine how much you could save on pens!

In today’s busy world, most people don’t want to be standing in line and waiting to check in — a mobile system can improve their patient experience by allowing them to check in and complete paperwork (like insurance verification) right on their device.

Similarly, the patient experience can be improved by reducing the amount of waiting patients need to do as front-desk staff perform data entry and other clerical tasks.

Normally, practices expect to process about twelve patients per-hour. Allowing patients to check-in at their leisure improves accuracy, helps your bottom line, and allows your staff to focus on other matters that need their attention.

Mobile Payments

Insert the chip. Now wait… keep waiting…

People are increasingly expecting to be able to pay for everyday expenses from their phone, and doctor’s offices are no exception. Mobile payments allow patients to pay co-pays (and other fees they may owe) with just a tap on their device.

Like filling out their paperwork, this is something they’ll be able to do on their own time — and again, it saves time for your desk staff. Paired with mobile check-in, you can cut away up to ten minutes per patient that used to be devoted to collecting payments by running cards, that’s a full 20% of your staff’s time that can be spent elsewhere.

Appointment Reminders

If all the stars aligned, and I remembered to leave fifteen minutes ago, maybe I could have made it?

Mobile check-in systems can send messages to patients that remind them of their upcoming appointment — and this has a bigger effect than most practices realize. Studies like this one show that reminders can reduce no-shows by over 40%.

In addition to reducing stress and no-shows, these notifications can be loaded with useful information like the address and phone number of your practice, and a link to mobile check in.

Compliance and Privacy

Let’s just say it’s WAY harder to get around an unsolvable math problem than that padlock on your file cabinet.

HIPAA compliance is always front of mind for any practice— and properly designed mobile check in systems are can actually be better for patient privacy. Rather than relying on paper forms that can be left unnecessarily exposed, mobile check in systems are able to secure and encrypt all protected patient information in a way that outsiders, quite simply, can’t access.