Home Health Admission Process Improvement Tips

What does the home health care intake process look like?

There's a few steps you must take in order to effectively serve your home health care patients. Here's
a sample workflow of the home health care admission process—from initial intake to the first visit.

Step 1

The patient's doctor makes a referral to a home health care provider.

Step 2

The home health care provider screens the referral and contacts the potential patient.

Step 3

The patient agrees to home health care and provides their insurance, payment, and personal information.

Step 4

The provider contacts the primary physician for the patient's medical records and discharge plan.

Step 5

An in-depth patient record is created by the provider, listing all medications, diagnoses, treatment plans, discharge notes, and demographic information.

Step 6

The patient schedules their first home health care visit and fills out detailed medical forms.

Step 7

The provider performs a home health care assessment during their first visit, including a medication reconciliation, physical, review of medical history, and discussion of the care plan.

Did you know?

Formstack's in-house Professional Services team is made up of expert form builders who can help you jumpstart your home health admission workflow.

Home health intake tips

The quality of care you provide patients is crucial to not only their health, but the health of your business as well. With nearly 40,000 companies providing home health care services in the U.S., patients have ample options for their needs. As competition continues to increase, it's important to follow best practices that keep your patients healthy, happy, and safe. This will help you retain current patients, attract new ones, and become a provider of choice for hospitals and doctor offices. Implementing an efficient and effective system is key to providing quality services that sets your home health care business apart. Transform your home health admission process with these tips to improve efficiency, data capture, and patient satisfaction.

Use online healthcare forms to improve patient data capture

Think about how much data goes into processing one patient for home health care services. Whether it's due to a paper form getting misplaced, a transcription error, or a mistake made during manual data entry, paper forms can wreak havoc on your home health care admission process. Medical errors (including paperwork mistakes) are the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. Minimize the risk of errors and improve data capture with online healthcare forms. Your staff, partners, and patients will love how easy digital healthcare forms make the home health intake process, and you'll see an improvement in the efficiency and accuracy of data capture. Form data can also be used to create patient documents.

Improve form accessibility

Paper forms can create barriers that slow down your intake process. If you're providing patients with fillable PDF forms, they may not have the tools needed to send the forms back to you, like a printer, scanner, or fax machine. Mailing paper forms is an inefficient and costly process that wastes your valuable time and resources. Improve the accessibility of your home health care intake forms by making them easy to access from a computer, phone, or tablet. Your staff can say goodbye to carrying clipboards, pens, and paper forms during home visits. Look for a form solution that offers offline form submissions so you can collect data anywhere, regardless of your internet connection or Wi-Fi access.

Track communication and collaboration with workflows

When taking on a new patient, you may need to communicate with multiple doctors, hospitals, health aids, and staff members before the patient's first home visit. Tracking all the data from these conversations and keeping everyone well-informed can become increasingly difficult. Implement digital workflows to streamline data collection and ensure all important information is kept secure and in one place. Instead of creating multiple forms that are sent out to different people at different times, combine your forms to create a standardized process. Connecting crucial stakeholders within one process will minimize errors, reduce miscommunication, and increase the speed of patient intake.

Increase security to better protect personal health information

Handling personal health information in a secure way is crucial to your home health admission process. If your processes are not up to par, you could be endangering the health and security of your patients, as well as the financial health of your business. HIPAA violations can lead to huge fines and major penalties, as well as losing the trust of patients and partners. Avoid this by implementing an online form solution that is fully HIPAA compliant. Look for features such as secure cloud storage, advanced data encryption, password protections, file access controls, and user-level permissions.

Simplify your home health intake process

Formstack provides a secure data collection solution that can help your business reduce paper, streamline key processes, and improve patient satisfaction. Formstack’s HIPAA compliant solution includes:

A signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA)
Secure email and data routing
File upload and electronic signature fields
Optimization tools for patient acquisition
Advanced workflow management tools
Dedicated support and onboarding

Offer online payment options that please your customers.

Accepting payments through custom online order forms is easier than you think. It's as simple as connecting your form to a leading payment processor, like Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.Net. Formstack provides powerful payment integrations that make it simple and secure for customers to make online payments through your business or ecommerce site.

But deciding what payment gateway to use for your business can be overwhelming. There are fees to consider, contracts to figure out, and many features to research. Here are ten, quick questions to help you choose the right payment gateway fast and meet your bottom line.

Which online payment gateway is right for you?

Use this online payment gateway comparison chart to help you choose the payment gateway that fits the needs of your business best.

View The Chart

Protect customer information.

A recent Verizon study found that PCI compliant businesses are 50% more likely to withstand a breach. Use Formstack's PCI compliant credit card fields to protect customer data from outside attacks.

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Powerful forms evaluation tools at your fingertips

Workflows

Automate your evaluation process from start to finish. Track progress and assign participants to review and comment on different sections.

Responsive Forms

All our forms are mobile-friendly out of the box. Pull up evaluation forms on your mobile device or tablet to free yourself from your desk.

Save & Resume

Need to halt an evaluation and finish it later? Auto-generate a return link so you can save answers and pick right back up where you left off.

Import/Export

Make the data you collect easily digestible and shareable. Import data via CSV and export information in CSV, Excel, Word, or PDF format.

Data Routing

Send submission data from your evaluation forms to other evaluators, managers, or departments depending on the specific criteria you set.

Electronic Signatures

Add an electronic signature field to an evaluation form or self-assessment to confirm that an evaluation has been finalized and accepted.

Integrate and automate.

Easily pass submitted form data to other apps with our selection of integration tools for web developers. You can set up your forms to meet any need. Update your company's CRM with new leads, add new contacts to your email marketing platform, collect online payments, and much more.

Build

Create a form from scratch or get started with one of our pre-made templates. You can quickly add the fields you need via drag and drop.

Connect

Activate your preferred integration by providing the necessary credentials and choosing how you want data to be passed from form to app.

Automate

Sit back and watch the data roll in. No coding or manual data entry needed. Easily populate documents, profiles, lists, spreadsheets, and more.

Don't see the integration you need amongst our form tools? We've got you covered. Create custom webhooks and API applications with our Developer Resources.

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Automate your intake procedure workflow

Streamlined intake procedures provide patients with quick and easy access to care, maintain high patient satisfaction, and improve patient retention. Gathering data before the initial intake assessment is crucial to developing effective treatment plans, minimizing administrative inefficiencies, and ensuring the patient's first appointment runs smoothly. Here's an example of how your organization can automate its mental health intake procedures to better serve patients and provide excellent care.

Jill completes the contact form on Dr. Evans' website.

Jill submits her contact information and provides details on her symptoms. She receives an automated email informing her of the next steps in the intake process, and her data is routed to Dr. Evans for review.

The office contacts Jill to confirm her request for treatment.

Once Jill confirms she wants to proceed with treatment, the office admin begins Jill's intake process by adding her to the new patient form portal. Jill receives an email alerting her to new forms she needs to complete, including forms for emergency contacts, medical history, and insurance.

Reminders are sent to Jill about unfinished forms.

Emails are automatically sent to Jill on a pre-determined basis to ensure Dr. Evans receives her information in a timely manner. After Jill's intake forms are complete and her insurance is cleared, the office sends her another form to book her initial intake assessment.

Jill's ePHI is automatically routed to key systems.

When Jill completes a form, her data is automatically directed to the business office's central systems. This reduces manual data entry for Dr. Evans' staff and ensures the integrity and security of data across the organization.

Jill's medical history is uploaded to the mental health intake form.

Once Jill has provided details for her primary care physician (PCP), her PCP receives an automated email with a link to her intake form where they can securely upload Jill's medical records. Using Formstack's HIPAA compliant solution, Jill's PCP is able to safely and securely upload the information as part of the workflow.

Dr. Evans performs Jill's initial intake assessment.

Dr. Evans fills out the rest of Jill's mental health intake form during the assessment. He also reviews a treatment plan with Jill, which he and Jill both electronically sign. Once the form is submitted, Jill's data is routed to the front desk to set up payments and recurring appointments.

Exceed HIPAA compliance standards.

Formstack offers an enterprise-level data management solution that is fully compliant with HIPAA. Mandatory security measures include access controls, data encryption, auditing, logging, and more.

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Assess your process often

Technology, trends, and customer expectations are constantly changing. If you're not assessing your customer service process on a consistent basis, it's time to do so. An easy way to do this is by adding a customer satisfaction survey to your process. Send this survey to any customer who has recently interacted with your customer service department to get a better understanding of their experience. You'll be able to unearth what your business is doing right, as well as what areas need improving.

Implement customer service automation workflows

Help your customer service team excel by giving them more time to focus on customers instead of tedious manual work. The more you can implement customer service automation workflows, the less time your team will need to spend on repetitive tasks. Focus on ways to improve communication, speed up processes, remove repetitive steps, and streamline data capture. When your customer service reps are able to fully focus on the customer, you're bound to see an increase in customer satisfaction and retention.