Cloud-based services are quickly becoming more common in healthcare, especially as organizations are trying to find HIPAA compliant ways of keeping ePHI secure. However, these tools cannot hinder how physicians and staff members perform daily operations.
Indiana Health Group (IHG) recently implemented HIPAA compliant forms through Formstack, which lets patients manage forms across multiple touchpoints. It is a cloud-based data capture tool, and is a much more efficient way to collect and store sensitive data securely, according to IHG President Dr. Chris Bojrab.
Bojrab explained that he is a board certified psychiatrist and has been practicing for about 20 years. IHG is a large, multidisciplinary mental health practice that has been around for 30 years.
“We have a total of about 55 clinical staff and about 15 support staff,” Bojrab said. “We have psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists. We’re multidisciplinary across multiple fields but it’s all mental health.”
Bojrab added that he does outpatient psychiatry, which means that he sees patients in the office for evaluations, and assessments. Then most of what he does is outpatient pharmacology, which is medication management and specializing in more treatment refractory patients.
“I do see a handful of therapy patients, but most of my day is spent working with patients on the medication and their treatment plan.”
The forms are essentially the new patient questionnaire, Bojrab explained.
“It just collects their demographic data, their insurance data, and then, essentially, past medical and psychiatric history,” he said. “This is a fairly substantial set of paperwork that we would’ve previously mailed out to the patient ahead of time.”
A very small percentage of patients would be willing to arrive 45 minutes prior to their scheduled appointment to handle the paperwork, Bojrab noted. This is why another option was needed.