Written by Matt Fiel
Titan’s forms for Salesforce are especially useful in the provider space where integration, holistic patient scores, and HIPAA compliance are required.
Here at Penrod, we’ve noticed a rising trend among our mental health provider clients: they’re starting to digitize their patient assessment procedures. Accurate and timely patient responses are key in the assessment process, directly affecting the success of patient health outcomes. Having a process that helps patients effectively supply the necessary information becomes a major determining factor.
Historically, assessment processes have relied on paper forms. It’s a massive problem across the entire healthcare industry, and especially noticeable in mental health.
Penrod’s Problem with Paper
Patient assessment is time consuming, especially when a provider is utilizing outdated PDF- or paper-based forms. Doctors spend a significant part of their time doing paperwork. Ultimately, that means they’re spending more time doing administrative work, and less time seeing patients. Not only does this result in worse care outcomes, but revenue takes a hit as well.
Ultimately, paper-based forms:
- Increase manual work
- Increase operational cost
- Increase errors
- Increase care delays
- Increase disparate data
As a result of these disadvantages, Penrod worked to take a client’s patient assessment process from paper to paperless.
Here’s the story.
The Answer: Automate Forms for Faster Results
One of our largest clients, a clinician-guided clinic offering outpatient behavioral health across multiple US states, wanted to innovate their assessment processes.
They were facing significant bottlenecks in the process as a result of their paper-based 9-item depression scale (PHQ-9) and 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7).
The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 are the most commonly used measures of depression and anxiety, making them vital to our client’s patient assessment process. Furthermore, the Patient Health Questionnaire Anxiety-Depression Scale (PHQ-ADS), a composite of the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, provides crucial insight into patient mental health.
They reached out to us to inquire about automating these paper-based forms completely. Their aim was to minimize manual data entry, reduce errors, automate assessment scoring, and increase the number of assessments they could conduct.
Finding the Ideal Platform for Salesforce Health Cloud
After reviewing the mental health clinic’s goals, Penrod and the key stakeholders agreed that the ideal solution would need to meet 3 key criteria.
The criteria were:
- Seamless integration into Salesforce Health Cloud
- Automated score processing to generate a patient index
-
Strict End-to-End HIPAA Compliance
It became clear that Titan Forms was perfect for the use case.
#1. Seamless Integration into Health Cloud
Titan Forms simplifies the syncing of form submissions with patient profiles in Health Cloud. It not only facilitates writing information but also reads data to pre-fill fields.
The seamless integration allowed us to bypass the need for custom APIs to connect the robust form engine with Health Cloud. Instead, we could dedicate our efforts to optimizing the PQH-9 and GAD-7 forms, making them as intuitive and automated as possible while maintaining their effectiveness.
#2. Automated Score Processing
Titan’s Forms with global and local variables made it possible for Penrod to develop a solution that stores, references, and manipulates data in real-time.
This enables us to process assessment scores from the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 forms in real time. This means that scoring no longer relies on manual calculation…rather, the final scores can be instantly submitted to the patient’s profile in Salesforce Health Cloud.
With additional processing through Health Cloud workflows, PHQ-ADS composite scores can also be automatically generated in the back-end, providing faster assessments of a patient’s mental health status.
This allows the clinicians to immediately act upon a holistic patient index.
#3. End-to-End HIPAA Compliance
Titan’s Forms only reads and writes data into Salesforce Health Cloud. This means that data is exclusively stored within the BA perimeter, ensuring its security. This means that data is only processed and stored by entities who need access.
As an additional precaution, Titan forms encrypts data in transit and at rest, making it incredibly suited to projects that require HIPAA compliance.
The Solution
Titan + Health Cloud + Penrod
Penrod was able to leverage Titan’s seamless integration into Health Cloud via web-to-lead forms.
We leveraged Titan’s drag-and-drop Salesforce Forms builder to create accessible forms, breaking down the previous limitations of the paper-based applications.
With Titan’s intuitive form creation, we were able to shift our focus towards form automations that provide significant time-saving and revenue-generating benefits. As a result, we developed real-time scoring to assess patient mental health instantaneously.
Upon completion, forms can be submitted to seamlessly generate a new patient record in Salesforce Health Cloud. This enables care teams to promptly initiate follow-up actions, ensuring efficient and timely care.
Automate Form Filling to Achieve more!
Our client’s new, paperless assessment process delivered multiple benefits.
- The implementation of the new process has exceeded expectations, resulting in a significant increase in the number of patient assessments.The new process significantly shortens the time-to-assessment by eliminating the need for manual data entry and scoring. Every step is now automated, allowing for a more efficient and streamlined workflow.
- The new process is more secure than the paper-based forms. Titan ensures HIPAA compliance by encrypting data both in transit and at rest. Moreover, all data is securely stored in a single location within our clients BA perimeter.
- The new process unifies data across the tech stack. As all data is seamlessly transmitted to Health Cloud, it becomes effortlessly accessible in one convenient location.
Our Final Take
In conclusion, the transformation from paper to paperless assessments has proven to be a game-changer for our client. Not only has it successfully eliminated operational bottlenecks, but it has also enhanced security, streamlined workflows, and improved accessibility of data. By leveraging the power of Titan Forms and Salesforce healthcare, we have effectively revolutionized the process of patient assessment in the mental healthcare domain.
The integration of advanced technology with healthcare best practices led to a significant increase in the number of patient assessments, underscoring the value of digital transformation in healthcare.
The healthcare industry is undergoing a digital revolution, and we are committed to harnessing the power of Titan and Salesforce to shape the future of healthcare.