New Products: Electronic Signatures

Healthcare delivery is a multi-billion dollar industry in this country…and the admissions process serves as a critical point of entry to the system. But watch any admissions professional, and you’ll soon realize that this essential step in patient processing involves tremendous responsibilities…and legal implications as well.

One area of growing interest in the admissions process centers around the idea of electronic signatures: that is, asking a patient to sign a specially designed signature pad or electronic clipboard and imbedding that signature as authorized by the patient into the myriad forms that may require a patient signature during an inpatient or outpatient experience.

FormFast is helping to find solutions to the question of electronic signatures with FormImprint, a system that supports electronic signatures.

According to Rob Harding, President and CEO of FormFast, FormImprint makes the Admissions process faster, more efficient and more accurate. "With electronic signature, the patient can review the various consent and other signature-required forms and sign all the documents at once," he explains. He adds that the patient can then see the signed documents on the screen and receive a hard copy for his or her records. "An optical image of the consent forms with embedded signature can then be stored into the database. Admissions, nursing, patient accounting, and other departments can retrieve the documents as they are needed, creating a totally paperless transaction," he adds.

FormImprint also supports the DataCard Rapid Registration system. The card swipe enters data to FormImprint and offers a choice of magnetic stripe or bar code. FormImprint can be updated by manual entry, DataCard, query of a hospital-supplied database file, or by querying a customer database by FormFast which is extracted from print data or HL7 messages.

If you’d like more information about FormImprint, we invite you to visit our web site at www.formfast.com, and then go to products. And if you’re planning to attend any of the conferences listed in this issue of the newsletter (see "Save The Date") be sure to stop by the exhibit hall for a demonstration.