Patient Intake Process

Patient Intake Process

Tonya Krchelich

HCR/220

December 15, 2013

Felecia Pettit-Wallace

Patient Intake Process

The process of patient intake is to gather information for the purpose of billing and medical care. Many practices require the patient to complete intake forms, before getting seem by a healthcare provider. These forms ask for information, such as, demographic information, medical history, and insurance information.

When a patient calls into an office for an appointment the first thing is the scheduler needs to verify if this is a new or established patient. A new patient is a patient that has not received any service from the provider for the past three years (Valerius, Bayes, & Newby 2014). An established patient is one that has been seen by the provider in the past three years. An established patient is also a patient who was seen by another provider in the same practice with the same specialty. When the patient is an established patient staff will review and update the information on file for the patient. When the patient is a new patient, they will need to complete intake forms provided by the provider. These forms can be lengthy and take up a lot of time. One way to improve this step of the intake process is to evaluate these forms. Look at the forms and decide if all of the information that is requested is really needed. Obviously, the provider does need to know name, address and telephone number. Decide if the patient really needs to write down their insurance information, especially, if you are just going to turn around and require the staff to make photocopies of the insurance card. Reevaluating the information that is initially required could save the staff time when verifying and updating the information at a later date.

The emergency department at Carolinas Medical Center has taken their intake process a step further. They implemented palmar scanning. This type of scanning is used to create a biomedical...