In our previous blog, “How Patient Self-Check-In Kiosks Improve Hospital Efficiency,” we began by discussing how the doctor-patient ratio in India is skewed against effective care delivery. Setting the scene for how this mounting pressure, especially on popular hospitals, can compromise patient experience, we argued that the strain can be partially relieved using patient check-in kiosks.
However, the key point, in terms of advancements in basic patient care infrastructure, is not the installation of healthcare touchscreen kiosks themselves.
Then, what do these self-service kiosks indicate?
A series of well-placed patient check-in kiosks across a hospital facility implies the following:
1. Onset of Automation: The beginning of a Digital Transformation journey to improve the quality of patient care and administrative task efficiency
2. Digital Maturity: An end-to-end digitised hospital management solutions suite or an advanced stage of Digital Transformation, fostering:
“Why is the journey towards Digital Maturity more urgent than ever?”—This is the question we will primarily answer in this blog, which will cover:
Let’s plunge in!
Examples of How Healthcare Touchscreen Kiosks Can Help
Based on Team POSIFLEX’s experience with healthcare providers, we resonated with the 2024 Deloitte article, “Restoring purpose in health care work through technology and workforce innovation”. The following data points cited and interpreted in the article—while they don’t directly describe the Indian scenario specifically—reflect the patient care challenges worldwide and how these challenges can be overcome with holistic Digital Transformation, which, we can argue, involves healthcare touchscreen kiosks:
Many of these revenue cycle professionals are the first line of interaction during hospital visits. Therefore, saving their work hours can ideally translate into a smoother patient experience than it is today.
With automation, about 13%-21% of the time spent on documentation can be saved. Similarly, administrative tasks, including scheduling, admission, and discharge, take up 5% of the work hours of the nursing staff; according to the article, automation can halve the time spent on these tasks.
In other words, Digital Maturity, encompassing state-of-the-art healthcare software and hardware installations, including POS systems and patient check-in kiosks, is not only efficient but vital for sustaining the human element of the healthcare system.
In fact, a study about redesigning documentation showed that streamlining documentation can reduce the time spent on it during a 12-hour shift to 30 minutes, compared to several hours intermittently spent during the shift. With automation or better inclusion of automation, the time spent on these necessary but burdensome, time-consuming, and “patient care quality-diminishing” tasks can be further reduced.
From the 2022 Deloitte article, “Giving Physicians More Time for Patient Care”, we learnt that approximately 16% of physicians in 2022 automated routine-visit-oriented administrative tasks, marking an 8-percentage point jump in 2 years. The article also mentions that basic questions, test results communication, and discharge orders are also increasingly automated, saving time for diagnosis and medical procedures. Similarly, there has been a rising trend in billing, referrals, and refill instructions, among other tasks, where manual intervention in the process was minimised.
Thanks to a superior degree of hospital workflow automation, healthcare touchscreen kiosks initiate a digitised patient care process. For example, patient check-in kiosks can minimise errors in the registration process, including the integration of physical healthcare records from other medical institutions, which the kiosks can be programmed to capture using their built-in camera. Secondly, cash dependency is reduced while billing errors are eliminated via kiosk-led automation, fostering increased trust in the hospital administration.
Other use cases are referral or revisit scheduling, as well as e-prescription issuance. When the doctor raises a referral for a second opinion or the attention from a different speciality, patients can directly schedule those appointments from the kiosk by logging into their patient accounts. At the same time, for recommended tests and medicines, patients can use the touch-sensitive, swift kiosks to pay and book slots for tests, as well as pick up already packed medicines when they go home or have them delivered home.
Besides, by reducing queue length, revenue cycle professionals don’t have to perform basic billing tasks and can instead help patients with complex insurance claims or focus on accounting and back-end financial work. On the other hand, unlike doctors and administrative staff, it may not be evident how kiosks reduce the information gap among nurses, patients, and doctors. However, given that nurses are an integral part of treatments, ultimately their charts are used by doctors for prescription, which in turn is automatically accessible via kiosks for medicine purchase, test booking, follow-ups, etc.
To reiterate, in healthcare Digital Transformation projects, kiosks are an essential part of the whole. However, selecting the right kiosk system is easier said than done, and as experts from one of the leading and sought-after OEMs worldwide, our colleagues have observed excellent suitability of the EK Series as patient check-in kiosks.
Below are the core features of the EK Series healthcare touchscreen kiosks, which lead, directly or indirectly, to an improved healthcare efficiency and quality:
To know about the EK Series in action, check out our case study blog: How Self-Checkout Kiosks Are Revolutionising Healthcare Operations: POSIFLEX EK Series in Narayana Health Facilities.
It is important to note that this project partly illustrates the potential of a resilient and comprehensive self-service kiosk in the healthcare industry; depending on the Digital Maturity of the healthcare automation ecosystem, all the capabilities of the touchscreen kiosk can be used.
For the various transactions to be processed as quickly as possible, the patient check-in kiosks from the EK Series leverage the powerful processors, the top-notch OS, and the responsive display. Similarly, the storage and memory configurations enable swift access to edge data, further hastening the processing speed.
The display size and brightness, on the other hand, ensure enhanced usability, while the peripherals and the in-built camera, barcode scanner, and printer offer a solid integrated interface for various tasks. At the same time, the modular design of the healthcare touchscreen kiosks helps them work alongside other peripherals, connected via multiple ports. This is how the kiosks, available in countertop and floor-standing avatars with vertical and horizontal display orientation, support diverse use cases without taking up a lot of space.
These features don’t just improve and drastically reduce clerical errors. They add to the overall Digital Maturity and empower uninterrupted communication among key stakeholders, including nurses, doctors, administrative staff, and patients, aiding test scheduling, medicine refills and purchase, referral management, and cashless payments, among other hospital formalities and core treatment-related tasks.
Curious to know more? Contact us now, and one of our executives will get in touch with you shortly!
POSIFLEX is a leading provider of innovative point-of-sale (POS) solutions, known for delivering reliable, high-performance hardware and comprehensive support.
