How to Implement Patient Intake Forms in Salesforce Health Cloud: A Step-by-Step Guide

The main purpose of healthcare is to provide immediate care and treatment to patients. Unfortunately, healthcare institutions, doctors, and nurses are often forced to waste their precious time climbing a mountain of administrative and reporting tasks. To address this issue and relieve healthcare providers of work burnout, organizations can invest in Salesforce solutions to automate these manual tasks and workflows that burden the system.

In this article, we explore the power of Salesforce to solve a common and often painful healthcare use case: patient intake forms. Patient intake forms underpin many vital healthcare processes, but how can you digitize these forms and integrate them with your Salesforce org?

We outline some of the main options for solving this use case, along with a light and efficient solution from an AppExchange leader. If you are a healthcare provider or simply looking for an easier way to integrate your forms with Salesforce Health Cloud using no-code, keep reading…

What Are Patient Intake Forms? 

Before providing the necessary medical care, organizations need to collect important patient information such as personal details, description of previous medical issues, family medical history, reason for treatment, signed consent, and confirmation that the patient is willing to take on any relevant financial responsibilities and payments not covered by insurance. And this is where patient intake forms come in – unless these are filled out, treatment cannot take place.

While an essential part of healthcare processes, patient intake forms can be a headache, eating into the time and busy schedules of both patients and healthcare workers. That’s why connecting patient intake forms to Salesforce seems like a no-brainer. 

Salesforce has a near-immaculate reputation when it comes to data security while still retaining the ability to fast-track tedious work. Similarly, the quality of its data can provide personalized insights into individual patients, making for higher-quality care. All around, Salesforce is an ideal option for healthcare institutions looking to streamline their processes. Even so, connecting healthcare forms to the CRM can come with its own set of challenges. Let’s look a little deeper below.

Challenges of Connecting Intake Forms to Salesforce Health Cloud

It’s important to bear in mind that Salesforce does not have robust native document generation, form-building, or eSignature solutions of its own. You can overcome this by investing in custom development or purchasing a third-party tool on the AppExchange to help optimize this process for you, we will take a look at both options a little later.

To help share the challenges, we will outline a real-life use case of a hospital struggling to effectively connect its patient intake forms to Salesforce. This large hospital desperately needs a custom Salesforce solution as it currently has a paper-based data collection system. This means they work with physical forms and spend many hours entering patient data (sometimes incorrectly) and scanning documents into Salesforce. 

Here are a few of the tasks that the hospital employees have to perform: 

• Explaining which sections of the form each patient needs to fill out. 
• Thinking about HIPAA compliance when patients are signing forms and protecting sensitive data.
• Manually entering data from the forms into Salesforce.
• Scanning forms had to be scanned into a PC to upload the digital version to Salesforce.
• Linking the forms to Accounts in Salesforce.
• Dealing with incorrect data entries that yield unreliable information for doctors and nurses when treating patients.
• Report creation is hindered by incorrect document formats, such as PDF.

Below is an example of a paper-based patient intake form like the one this hospital had to deal with. Not only does all this information have to be manually filled in, but also physically signed to stay compliant.

For these reasons, the hospital had to make a change and upgrade the way they collect patient data. But what options do they have?

Custom Development for Salesforce Health Cloud

One option the hospital could choose is custom development for intake forms. The biggest perk of developing your intake form solutions for Salesforce is you will end up with a highly customized solution specifically tailored to the requirements of your organization. 

However, this custom coding does take a long time to develop while consuming significant resources. If a healthcare provider does not have in-house developers, then it would have to spend money on third-party coders and be willing to invest in ongoing maintenance.

An eSign Solution for Salesforce Health Cloud

Instead, the hospital opts to purchase a third-party tool to help them enhance their Salesforce health services. They approach Titan, a no-code platform on the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace, to create a dynamic form that integrates directly into Salesforce to collect patient data in real-time. 

With this new digital form, patients can accurately provide personal information securely from any destination that has an internet connection. The automated process also completely eradicates manual tasks from data collection activities at the hospital. 

Here is what the new and improved patient intake solution looks like: 

• The hospital has web forms to automatically collect and push data to Salesforce.
• If teams need new forms, they can easily build custom ones using Titan Web’s drag-and-drop builder.
• Buttons and other validation options are included for data types on the forms to ensure data integrity in Salesforce.
• The forms are responsive and mobile-friendly, so patients can fill them out easily.
• Patients navigate through the forms with click options to only submit information that is relevant to their treatment.
• Forms include a HIPPA Regulation Rights page, meaning patients can electronically sign on their devices.
• Hospital employees can track signatures, documents, and patient data in Salesforce. All patient data in transit is secure and HIPAA-encrypted.
• Uploaded documents are stored as related records in Salesforce.
• Hospital managers can view when the documents were sent to patients, as well as when they viewed and completed the forms.

To learn more about Titan for Salesforce Health Cloud, book a demo now!

Summary

Intake forms are an excellent example of a process that Salesforce patient relationship management can take to the next level, but this does not mean the use case is easy to action! 

Whether you opt for custom development or a third-party tool, by integrating your patient intake forms (or any healthcare form) with Salesforce, you will experience unprecedented personalization, automation, and efficiency.