Subscribe
Blog

The Ultimate Guide to Using Formstack for Healthcare

Stefanie Jansen |
July 27, 2023
|
10
Min Read

It’s a tough time to be in healthcare. Staffs are shortchanged, but patients expect greater convenience and service. Budgets are down, but employees need more intuitive technology to do their jobs efficiently.

Perhaps you already underwent digital transformation and built a patient portal that integrates with your EHR and other systems. But that was most likely 10 years ago now—and what you have isn’t suited to the challenges of the post-pandemic era. 

This is what we call “the healthcare digital paradox.”

The Digital Paradox in Healthcare

The need is great for digital healthcare solutions that easily integrate with EHR and CRM while meeting compliance standards like HIPAA, HITRUST, and FHIR. They must be seamless enough to route data from patients, powerful enough to offer features that meet a variety of needs, and robust enough to maintain a single source of truth. 

But they have to be simple enough for the non-tech user, too.

Everyone on your back office staff (not just IT) must be able to easily create digital healthcare workflows. It shouldn’t take a tech degree to make new patient acquisition, registration, referrals, and billing workflows smoother. And even if you have the software, it shouldn’t take weeks or months to build them. 

With Formstack, it doesn’t have to. Formstack for healthcare offers the best of both worlds: the power for anyone on your team to build powerful, consumer-facing workflows and the flexibility and functionality for your more tech savvy team members to build crucial business system connections. Healthcare IT teams get an open API and workflow automation features like SSO, conditional logic, and approvals. On the front end, those in healthcare marketing, finance and billing, HR, or admin get an intuitive drag-and-drop visual workflow builder to build any healthcare workflow they might need.

Still not sure such a solution is possible? We have the healthcare organization testimonials to prove it.

See Formstack for Healthcare in Action

Most likely, the first experience a patient has with your office or healthcare system is through your website. But it might not be doing you any favors if you can’t gather important newcomer data or provide a seamless initial experience that keeps them coming back. 

Formstack securely captures data, routes it to the right place, and automates document generation and eSigning from that same data—all in a smooth workflow your employees appreciate (and your patients find convenient). See for yourself in our Formstack for Healthcare demo. 

Keep Reading: James Bobbitt, Director of Web and Digital Management at Willis-Knighton Health Systems, shares how the organization cut patient onboarding by 25 minutes with automated workflows.

Healthcare Workflows to Automate Now

Not sure how you’d implement healthcare automation in your office? The potential applications are endless. Formstack has automated more than 140 million interactions in the last 12 months for companies across industries—from collecting data and automating workflows to generating documents and collecting eSignatures. 

Healthcare companies typically use Formstack for:

New Patient Intake

New patients have more to worry about than filling out mounds of paperwork. (Like this.) With digital patient intake through a HIPAA-friendly form, you can make the process easier for everyone from patients to staff. From there, use the information to populate other necessary medical forms or generate important documents like referrals or billing statements. Use features to make it your own like:

  • Customizable questions/fields
  • Branding and themes
  • Mobile-friendliness
Try It: Get started with our pre-built new patient intake form

Patient Health History

No more duplicate paper forms. Collect patient health history once, then use the data to inform other areas of the patient journey. You’ll also improve the patient experience by reducing waiting room delays. Patients can conveniently fill out the information prior to arrival or use their mobile phone in the waiting room to submit quickly and efficiently. Plus, rest easy knowing the form you’re using to collect sensitive health data is equipped with:

  • Advanced encryption
  • User-level permissions
  • Audit logging
  • Regular security maintenance
Try It: Get started with the pre-built patient health history form

Patient Discharge

Make it easier on your doctors and support staff to quickly discharge patients and get back to those who still need care. Plus, automated workflows make the next steps on their care journey (whether routing to admin for final billing or another facility for continuing care) hassle-free. Healthcare users often pair this template with:

Try It: Get started with the pre-built patient discharge form

Healthcare Orgs Like You

There’s no better way to learn what healthcare workflows can do for your organization than to see it in practice. Healthcare organizations just like yours benefit from secure data management, more organized office admin, and even healthcare marketing. 

AdventHealth: Tighten Security After a Data Breach

Any organization would be wary of new software after undergoing a data breach—especially if it’s the same tool that was exploited. After the form tool on its website was breached, AdventHealth needed a replacement that could quickly continue data collection while helping it achieve its HIPAA compliance. 

AdventHealth easily transitioned to Formstack, launching forms ranging from contact us to appointment requests. The drag-and-drop form builder made it easy to create any new form without code, while email notifications and communications promoted a more engaged user environment. AdventHealth even seamlessly integrated its Salesforce data for more tailored marketing and patient follow-up. 

As a result, AdventHealth:

  • Launched 400 HIPAA-friendly forms in one day
  • Implemented new workflows across 80 campuses
  • Consolidated form management to just one marketing employee
See for Yourself: Formstack Forms HIPAA Quick Start Guide

University of Tennessee Medical Center: Digitize the Back Office

As Operations Manager at The University of Tennessee Medical Center, Sarah Galyon’s job is to build better processes. The UT Medical Center was constantly running into issues due to inefficient workflows that relied on paper, email, and fax machines. Sarah went on a mission to digitize healthcare workflows, from doctors orders to patient referrals, for smoother medical office management. 

As a result, the team:

  • Went paperless
  • Created HIPAA-friendly workflows for external data collection
  • Replaced faxes, phone calls, and emails with a singular workflow
  • Empowered staff to build digital processes
Watch Sarah explain how Formstack redesigned UT Medical Center processes.

Napkin Marketing: Healthcare Marketing

Beyond treatment and patient intake, healthcare marketers also see the benefits of healthcare workflow management with improved patient acquisition and campaigns. Napkin Marketing works with clients in a variety of industries, including healthcare. With dozens of integrations and branding options, Formstack gives Napkin Marketing the versatility to create custom forms that send auto-responses, accept payments, and more.

Want to try it yourself? One way to improve your healthcare marketing is to include a health or pain assessment form on your website. This allows potential patients to take inventory of all their systems while making an informal introduction to your hospital or practice. It also gives you the opportunity to gather valuable data that will personalize future conversations and provide “up-sell” opportunities for other services your network offers. 

Get Started: Set up your own pain assessment workflow with these templates and features. 

Need help? Formstack partner Coastal Cloud helps healthcare clients launch quickly, eliminate paper, automate workflows, and easily add or update new processes. As a platinum Salesforce consulting partner, Coastal Cloud also makes it easy to streamline data management processes

Top Features for Healthcare Automation

No healthcare organization is the same. Your size, locations, and org structure present challenges other practices may not have (and vice versa). That’s why the Formstack Platform offers a variety of features to help you solve challenges in a variety of departments and stages along the patient care journey.  

  • SSO User Management — Enable quick and secure user management through popular identity providers, saving time and money for your IT.
  • Time-Based Logout — Log out a user if they’re inactive for 15 minutes to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information.
  • Password Enforcement — Ensure users maintain strong passwords that meet specific requirements to protect sensitive data and prevent unauthorized access.
  • Two-Factor Authentication — Prevent unauthorized access by requiring users to provide a second form of ID.
  • Data Encryption — Protect your online forms, submission data, workflows, and email notifications by encrypting information in transit using SSLT/TLS 1.2 and at rest using AES-256 in Formstack’s online database. 
  • SMTP — Formstack uses simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) to ensure email notifications and confirmation messages are delivered reliably and securely to the email provider of your choosing.
  • Field Security — Restrict access to specific form fields, prevent certain data from being included in notification emails, mask data as it's entered, and require submitters to confirm the information in a second field for accuracy. 
  • File Storage — By enabling encryption, files can only be accessed by Forms users and admins.
  • Folder Permissions — Control data access and ensure only identified users can view or modify forms and submissions within a folder.
  • Integration Limits — Limit integrations to providers, such as Google Entities, Stripe, Salesforce, Dropbox, Box.net, and Paypal.
  • User Activity History — Request a list of user actions with a record of specific details to provide insight into the activities within your Formstack Forms environment. 
  • GlobalSign — Collect and validate electronic signatures with our GlobalSign partnership. Apply certifications to the final PDF version of your document to verify its authenticity and integrity.
  • Audit Trails — Track the signature process from start to finish with a detailed history of the signature request, signer's details, and completion. 
  • Password Protection — To better ensure the signee is the correct recipient, allow signees to leverage a password provided by the requestor before signing a document.
  • Document Deletion — Remove unwanted documents from your account with a written request.
  • Permission Sets — Assign specific actions to users or groups, granting varying access levels without altering profiles. 
  • License Assignment — Grant a Salesforce user license to a specific user to control who can access specific features and functionality within the Salesforce platform.
  • Sharing Rules — Allow a user or groups in Salesforce to access records they would not normally have access to based on criteria such as the record owner or certain field values. 
  • Encrypted fields — Encrypt sensitive form data using the Forms for Salesforce NativeCloud Pro app, ensuring the data is processed and stored securely in Salesforce.  
  • Data Storage — Store Forms for Salesforce data in your Salesforce instance with NativeCloud Pro.

Start Automating Your Healthcare Workflows

No matter your challenge, required use case, or goal, Formstack has the healthcare workflows to digitize your processes, eliminate manual work frustrations, and grow your network. Healthcare organizations around the globe turn to Formstack for a secure way to transform their back office processes and become more efficient for operational ease that keeps employees happy and patients satisfied. 

Is it time to take your workflows to the next level? Speak with one of our workflow consultants today for a personalized look at what digital workflows your organization could benefit from. 

Blog

Our 2024 Education Guide is Here

Learn some top takeaways of our new Education Guide and see what workflows you should be automating right now.
Read more
Stefanie Jansen |
Stefanie is a marketing writer with specialties in blogging, website writing, and copy editing. She has worked with a number of tech companies and has experience in the areas of email, marketing campaigns, and employee engagement. Connect with Stefanie at word4wordwriting.com.
More Articles