A growing number of consumers are demanding patient self-referral and online appointment booking services. Yet many healthcare organizations have still yet to offer them. In this blog, we outline 6 tips to help you implement these innovative services and ensure their success.
Cast your mind back to 2020 — a year plagued by lockdowns, face masks, and social distancing rules. Across the world, healthcare organizations were forced to transform their operations overnight. This required a complete overhaul of their in-person and manual processes.
Though the pandemic is now a distant memory, the demand for innovative healthcare services still remains. Today, consumers expect convenience. They expect online doctor appointments, patient self-referral, and direct-to-consumer healthcare services. And they expect organizations to take action.
In some parts of the world, this message has been heard loud and clear. In England, every GP practice must now offer online appointment bookings throughout the day. This is just one step towards the anticipated launch of “NHS Online” in 2027.
But not all organizations are following suit. Though almost 90% of health system executives regard digital transformation as a top priority, 75% say they have not yet planned for it.
If you’re one of these organizations, consider this article your starting point.
Before we jump into our practical tips, let’s first reiterate the benefits of online healthcare services.
For your healthcare practice, digital appointment scheduling and patient self-referral reduce administrative burdens. There are fewer phone calls to make, shorter queues at your reception desks, and less room for human error or forgetfulness. In turn, giving your clinicians more patient-facing time.
For your patients, online services are often fairer and more convenient. There’s no “first come, first serve” mentality, time wasted listening to telephone hold music, or money spent on needless travel.
What’s more, with a digitized record of appointments and treatment plans, practitioners and patients can break down communication barriers and improve information sharing. Everyone wins.
The question now is: how can you facilitate these kinds of digital services in your organization?
Before you can start to build and roll out online appointment booking and self-referral services, you’ll need to craft a project plan.
What will these services look like? Where will they sit? Who will run the project? What metrics will you use to measure progress? How will you ensure compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, or any other data protection regulation?
Create a business plan that comprises a mission statement, project aims, resources needed (both human and financial), timelines, and milestones.
The next course of action is to build out your new services.
How you go about this will depend on your budget, preferences, and the input of your IT teams. Some healthcare organizations, including the NHS, use dedicated appointment scheduling or triage systems.
Others may choose to integrate custom appointment booking forms on their website or extranet. Depending on the digital workplace or intranet software you use, you may be able to build these forms within the system — saving you time and money.
Take Claromentis as an example. Our integrated business process automation platform, InfoCapture, allows you to design dynamic e-forms for any process — whether it’s arranging GP appointments, capturing observation notes, or building innovative self-referral systems. The platform requires no code or development expertise, making it easy for anyone to use. Best of all, the forms live in your intranet, meaning staff can manage submissions alongside their calendars, documents, policies, and more.
The process of booking a medical appointment hinges on a series of handovers. Once a patient fills in a form, their details are sent to a care coordinator (or whoever is responsible for screening and triaging requests), who then organizes an appointment with a suitable healthcare professional. In some cases, there may be additional steps involved, such as reaching out to the patient to request further medical details.
Although self-referrals are often much simpler — as patients can autonomously select from a list of available appointments — there are still some important steps involved in the post-booking process. For example, you may want to send out a confirmation email, or provide advice to help your patients prepare for their upcoming appointment.
The point is: these online services rely on a series of links. If one link doesn’t connect to another, the whole process falls apart.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, you need to support your online forms with automated workflows. By setting custom service-level agreements (SLAs), statuses, and triggers, you can ensure that each patient request travels to the right expert, who can then perform the appropriate action in a timely manner.
In order for online self-referrals to work, data must flow seamlessly and securely between your systems. This includes your patient-facing and point-of-care applications, as well as your single patient records (SPRs), digital workplace tools, scheduling systems, and more. In some cases, you may even have to exchange the data with external healthcare providers, such as care homes or social service workers.
To facilitate this data interoperability, you’ll need to integrate your systems via API and ensure your data is uniformly formatted for quick interpretation. In addition to this, we’d strongly advise refreshing your regulatory knowledge, encrypting your data, and enforcing watertight security controls wherever possible.
Change management is often the biggest barrier to digital transformation. If your staff and patients can’t use your new services, they’ll never achieve the results you expected.
Craft internal e-learning resources to build confidence in your healthcare and admin teams, and test their competency with engaging quizzes. You can also assist staff with step-by-step knowledge base articles and FAQs.
For your patients, consider sharing walkthrough videos and blog posts via your app and website. Be mindful of elderly patients and anyone else who might struggle with technology, too. These patients may prefer printed pamphlets or a helpful telephone call.
It’s also worth noting that your online applications should never fully replace your in-person and telephone services. Indeed, over a third of UK citizens never or rarely use the NHS App because they don’t want to engage with technology or would prefer to speak to a person. So always keep your options open and respect individual preferences.
Leading on from this, you’ll also need to factor in accessibility considerations. Are the forms written in simple language? Is it possible to enable text-to-speech? Can website visitors or app users adjust the contrast and font size to suit their needs?
When building out these systems, consult your IT teams and external accessibility experts. Try to make these tools useful for everyone.
Over half of US Americans agree that healthcare technology would improve their patient experiences. And they’re not wrong.
Take the UK as a leading example. NHS practices that implement digital triage and online appointments are able to resolve 94% of patient issues within 24 hours. Imagine the positive impact this could have on your organization and the patients you care for.
If you’ve yet to kickstart your digital transformation, we’d recommend exploring Claromentis’ possibilities.
With our HIPAA-compliant digital workplace solution, you can design intuitive forms and intelligent automated workflows — all within a secure, feature-rich intranet. Granular user permissions and extranet capabilities enable you to share these services with your patients without compromising security. Integrated communications, knowledge sharing, and e-learning functionality empower you to manage bookings alongside your daily operations. And third-party integrations connect your external systems to improve data interoperability and reduce tech sprawl.
If you’d like to find out more about our digital workplace for regulated industries, please schedule a 10-minute discussion call with one of our experts. We’ll assess your needs, discuss pricing options, and spin-up a bespoke demo for you to trial for 30 days.
Online booking systems in healthcare typically follow three stages:
Occasionally, the healthcare practice may need to contact the patient before the final step in order to gather additional details.
Self-referrals allow patients to request healthcare services without needing to book an appointment with their GP first. Examples of self-referrals include:
To keep track of patient referrals, you’ll need to build forms that allow referrals to pass between healthcare providers and associated external parties. Automated workflows and defined SLAs ensure no referral is left unchecked. This means you can progress requests without delay.
It’s important to note that you may need to connect systems via API integrations, as well consider additional data interoperability practices.