Kiosks

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Kiosks are used throughout healthcare for various administrative and clinical purposes. Sometimes called "point of service" or "point of care" devices, the purpose of this offering is in providing patients or patient representatives with the opportunity to perform activities normally performed by staff or in a non-electronic or non-standard manner.

Uses

Administrative

  • Contact information review (e.g., address, next of kin, emergency contact, etc...)
  • Insurance review and collection
  • Payment collection
  • Appointment Check-in
  • Viewing and printing of information
    • patient-specific information, such as future appointments)
    • general information, such as facility information)
  • Wayfinding and navigation
  • Queuing
    • Patient-facing - pharmacy, lab, radiology, and appointment queuing
    • Staff-facing - patient tracking
  • Filling out e-forms
  • Biometric authentication

Clinical

  • Medication and allergy review
  • Clinical surveys/questionnaires
  • Vital signs capture
  • Clinical reminder collection

Examples of uses

  • Department of Veterans Affairs has kiosks in check-in areas for patients to review and sponsor updates to contact information, check in for appointments, submit a release of information form, request beneficiary travel mileage reimbursement, and obtain directions to their appointment(s)[1]
  • Largo Medical Center provides kiosks in their Emergency Department to support a self-triage effort[2]
  • Vitals kiosk allows patients to perform vital sign capture, helping free up support staff[3]


Benefits

  • Faster check-in process
  • Allows an organization to standardize and easily modify interactions with patients
  • Provides patients with direct access to their healthcare information
  • Allows patients to become more involved with their healthcare
  • Expedite services
    • Make staff aware of patient needs immediately upon arriving on site or checking in
  • Offers the ability to collect and analyze data to adjust resources
    • Operationally - Real-time feedback to staff can identify areas where additional resources are needed
    • Analytically - Allows the enterprise to compare services against each other to identify both strong and weak performers
    • Can sync up with non-kiosk data to observe how service offerings interact with one another (e.g., the amount of time nursing support spends with a specific patient cohort when compared to another patient cohort)
  • Helps free staff up to facilitate patients with complex questions or issues
  • Facilitate the moving of pertinent healthcare activity into the waiting room
    • Gather responses to questions normally asked by staff
    • Electronically capture responses for review

Issues

  • Buy-in with patients and staff can be problematic
  • Requires a physical footprint be dedicated, even for tablets
    • Traffic pattern needs to be well thought out
  • Costly
    • Hardware purchase
    • Software purchase or design
    • Various support service needs (Hardware, software, configuration, etc...)
  • Security and privacy needs require additional attention
  • Move to mobile technology use may eliminate most benefits

Organizations using kiosks

Department of Veterans Affairs[4]

Department of Defense[5]

Kaiser Permanente[6]

Johns Hopkins[7]


Submitted by Shawn Adams