Labor shortages have been a mission-critical issue in the healthcare industry. This has made it even harder for technology companies to handle enrollment processes, which can be complex. To facilitate enrollment despite these staffing shortfalls, it’s critical for the industry to develop and use new systems.

Time-consuming processes

Onboarding facilities and providers has been a time-consuming and arduous process. Despite many technological advances in the healthcare industry, it’s remained largely manual. Even in our Clinical Exchange ePrescribe system, enrollment averaged five to seven days. Featuring a workflow that was manually intensive, EMRs needed to create a case in an internal project management/CRM tool and then attach files. When required information was missing, enrollment took even longer thanks to frequent back-and-forth messages.

Even after they were onboarded onto our Clinical Exchange ePrescribe platform, EMRs would have to submit support tickets to add or remove providers or users. This typically took another one to three days, placing an additional burden on already stretched clinical and administrative staff—a financial burden for EMRs in this era of rising employee costs.

Development of a superior solution

Based on interviews with existing customers, we began improving the Clinical Exchange user experience for our EMR partners and their customers. Along with more efficiency, customers indicated they wanted more control over the overall process. They also asked for the ability to view the status of their enrollments. Over several months, we developed a portal prototype, tested it on customers, then further refined the site.

New Clinical Exchange ePrescribe Self-Service tool

The result is the Clinical Exchange ePrescribe Self-Service Tool (SST), which we introduced this past spring. Through SST, EMRs can now submit and manage new enrollments, adjust live sites adding and removing caregivers and users, and easily work problems from a to-do list within one workflow tool—without needing to submit support tickets and wait for help.

More control with decreased costs and enrollment times

SST gives EMRs more control over the enrollment process. Plus, it helps save time and reduces costs in enrollment and support team staffing. The portal is user-friendly; most customers have been learning how to use it in less than half an hour. Thanks to its efficiency and simplicity, EMRs can redeploy staff who were handling the enrollment process to more critical business areas.

Thanks to our new Clinical Exchange SST, the average time to register a new practice has been reduced from several days to fewer than 30 minutes. The average time to add or remove a provider or user has decreased from more than one day to 12 minutes. Plus, our statistics show that SST has resulted in an 80% reduction in service requests.

Staff shortages are a serious problem. However, solutions like this one help to address and overcome it. Because the portal expedites and automates an important and routine process, employees who formerly handled enrollment can be redeployed to complete more critical tasks. Leveraging the latest technology should be used to improve other workflows.