Digital kiosks have helped Boston Medical Center Health System serve more patients and more easily meet regulatory requirements.
The health system started installing iPads for patient check-ins last year across inpatient and outpatient departments.
“Patients are experiencing this form of automation all throughout their daily lives on an ongoing basis,” Joy Brown, senior vice president and chief digital information officer at Boston Medical Center Health System, told Becker’s. “So when they interact with us as a hospital system, our goal, when we bring digitization to them, is to give them a very similar experience.”
The return on investment includes freeing up time for more appointments, increasing focus on care quality rather than administrative work, and efficiently ensuring patients are signing care consent forms. Boston Medical Center is also more simply gathering social information about patients for value-based care and other programs.
“Physicians and patients are extremely excited about it, and primarily because it allows them to have the same expectations they do outside of healthcare,” Ms. Brown said. “We expect a fast pace, we expect an ease of user experience, and then we ultimately expect the services that follow behind it to have the same themes, and we are getting confirmation from patients and physicians that we’ve met that expectation.”
Boston Medical Center is taking a phased approach to the rollout, working to serve its large non-English speaking population by ensuring the language and translation features of the iPads are optimized.
The kiosks are just one part of what Ms. Brown dubbed Boston Medical Center’s “digital journey,” which will also include AI for clinical documentation, care insights, regionalization, length of stay, denials reduction, and sepsis detection.
“We’re looking across what I’ll call the ‘value chain’ of that experience, and identifying opportunities for the use of AI, the use of automation, and then, of course, reducing any friction that care providers or patients experience,” she said.
