It’s easy to love MacPractice’s Patient Portal - it is a revolutionary step in patient engagement that gives patients access to their information and control of their medical history. Using their Patient Portal accounts, your patients can easily access lab results, visit summaries, appointment requests, and have secure, HIPAA complaint communications with your office through secure messaging. Patient Portal also has an additional feature for online scheduling where potential patients can pick from available times to schedule their first appointment with your office. Time slots available in your schedule are dictated by you, so available scheduling is always under your control.
While these much beloved features are certainly of great benefit to practices using the Patient Portal, one of the most popular, ‘can’t miss’ features of the Patient Portal is the ability to send your patients forms to complete online before their visit to your office.
You’ll Love Online Patient Forms
A key feature for Patient Portal is the ability to let patients complete forms on the web before their appointment using a HIPAA compliant method that both encrypts the data and sends the patient’s information directly to your patient database.
Other tools for creating patient forms, such as web tools and platforms aimed at collecting surveys, may not be able to offer the Business Associate Agreement required for HIPAA compliance without charging additional, exorbitant fees - sometimes up to several thousands of dollars a month, depending on the number of providers, patient forms, and even responses that you get each month. Worse, many of these tools collect the data in insecure spreadsheets or even plain text emails that are not very easy for a doctor to use. A patient may be able to fill out these forms online and at home, but a member of the practice staff will need to reenter the data into the practice management system or electronic healthcare record in order to use it with billing and the patient’s medical or dental record. That’s a lot of redundant data entry and some might say the inconvenience to the staff outweighs the connivence to the patient.
With the MacPractice Patient Portal’s Online Forms feature, patients can complete virtually any type of form (including registration, social, and health history forms) on the web through the Patient Portal. An email invitation with a link to complete a form is sent to a patient. Completed forms are incorporated into the patient's record in MacPractice. If it is a routine visit with an existing patient, they can also fill out any forms related to the specific visit, or simply update their information online. These forms are also mobile friendly, so your patients can compete them on a smartphone or tablet device with a few taps.
