You Should Know About:
Forms Control

There’s no question that electronic forms are generating growing interest at a wide array of business enterprises across the country. But it’s important to remember that whether forms are pre-printed, printed on demand, or purely electronic, forms control remains an essential part of your process improvement.

Pam Landry, Senior Systems Consultant with FormFast offers the following insights regarding this essential topic. "Every facility needs forms control. And maintaining control over electronic forms is important to keep the size of the chart down." According to Pam, when forms control is successful, coding, indexing and storing the chart electronically is generally easier. "If you don’t have control, you can create a hardware nightmare for your facility, which requires continuous updating of servers to hold the large volumes of information."

But there are other benefits to carefully reviewing and assessing a form’s usefulness to your facility. Pam explains, "A hospital’s Forms or Medical Records Committee can and should review all forms to ensure that documentation isn’t allowed to bypass the process for determining a form’s validity in the system." She adds, "If forms proliferate without review, then no one may know whether they’re still useful." Facilities can end up with forms that actually bog down processes and cost the facilities needless dollars. She concludes, " Without forms control, facilities end up wasting money and energy on obsolete forms, but the costs are more hidden than with paper forms."

Identifying, categorizing and analyzing forms at your facility is a critical and potentially time-consuming process (See sidebar: Form Categories). FormFastSite has been designed to help customers control and manage their forms.

If you’d like more information about Forms Control and how your facility might benefit from this approach, email us at info@formfast.com.

1. Admitting Forms
(these include forms for registration, consent, insurance, living will, and billing contracts);

2. Nursing Chart forms
(this group includes progress notes, nursing care records, MARs, surgery consents, patient assessment forms, physicians’ orders and change sheets);

3. Informational forms
(this might include pre-admission instructions, standing physician orders, patient aftercare instructions, policy manuals/procedure sheets, and patient opinion surveys; and

4. Financial forms
(such as accounts payable checks, statements, payroll checks, and deposit advice.