New webinar preview: How healthy is your consent process?

Here’s a question you may never have considered before: How healthy is your consent process?

You might not think of your organization’s various processes and workflows as having their own “health,” but they actually do. In most businesses, healthy processes add value to the completion of a product or service. In healthcare, that value directly contributes to the experience and the health of the patient. Unhealthy processes don’t add value—and they may actually reduce it.

You can even take the analogy one step further. Much as clinicians can diagnose a malady by observing its effects on different parts of the body, you can “diagnose” the health of your consent process by assessing the value it adds to different facets of your organization.

How does an unhealthy consent process impact your patients, your staff and your bottom line? That’s the topic of my new webinar on June 29: How Healthy Is Your Consent Process?

A healthier patient experience

Patients have high expectations of their healthcare providers. (As they should!) Yet there are times when consent processes let them down, and those experiences range from annoying to infuriating.

For instance, 95% of patients have had to provide the same information more than once. That’s annoying.

On the opposite end of the scale, what happens when a consent form for a procedure goes missing? The patient may have taken time off work, fasted for the better part of a day, and made umpteen other arrangements—and now their procedure has to be postponed because of a missing form. That’s infuriating—but not all that rare. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that consent forms were missing for 66% of surgical patients, resulting in ten percent of cases being delayed.

A healthy, digital-based consent process—such as eConsent from Interlace Health—makes it easier for patients to complete the necessary forms and much more difficult for staff to misplace them. That makes your patients’ experience healthier.

A mentally healthier staff

Your clinicians, nurses and other staff should have one priority: patient care. Of course, we all know there’s more to the job than that, and always will be. And while there may always be some amount of paperwork, excessive paperwork is a burden that’s definitely not healthy for your organization.

In fact, 92% of clinicians think administrative work is a major contributor to healthcare worker burnout. Definitely unhealthy.

Processes built around eConsent from Interlace Health can reduce a great deal of that burnout potential, because your staff will no longer have to waste time searching through in-baskets or folders for forms. All they need to do is scan a patient’s wristband to ensure the correct consent form is generated—and patient records are incredibly easy to archive and retrieve, without additional manual entries, scanning or indexing.

Reducing staff stress is a strong sign that you are creating a healthy consent process.

Healthier financial performance

Unhealthy, paper-based consent processes hurt your bottom line. Research has found that consent delays cost the average 500-bed hospital $265,112 annually—and larger hospitals can experience losses in excess of $2 million.

That’s not surprising when you consider that one minute of operating room time costs an average of $36 to $37. Multiply that figure by the length and frequency of delays, and then by the total number of procedures your hospital performs each year, and the total cost of surgical delays turns into a significant hit to your financial performance.

(At $36 a minute, a single one-hour delay costs $2,160. A hospital with one such delay every day would lose more than $15,000 per week.)

On the other hand, hospitals using eConsent from Interlace Health have reported saving more than 10 minutes per consent completed, along with up to three days faster archiving per consent. Additionally, they never experience a missing consent causing a delay in surgery. A healthy consent process is clearly reflected by a healthier bottom line.

On June 29, our webinar will examine these aspects of healthy and unhealthy consent process more closely. You’ll have the chance to ask questions about:

• • How paper-based consents can undermine patient experience
  • Why most staff members strongly prefer digital consenting
  • The true budgetary costs of paper-based consent processes

Please join me for How Healthy Is Your Consent Process? Examining patient, staff, and financial impacts on June 29.