Medical kiosks are quietly revolutionizing the healthcare landscape. Recent research shows that healthcare kiosks can increase front office staff efficiency by 10-15% with sales expected to exceed $3 billion by 2027. In this installment of The Immersive Nurse we’ll be exploring how medical kiosks are changing the way patients receive care and streamlining processes for both healthcare teams and patients.
The Role of Medical Kiosks in Healthcare Transformation
Kiosks offer an innovative and efficient approach to address the need for increased access, improved processes, and reduced wait times in healthcare.
Advantages for patients and healthcare providers
Medical kiosks offer a range of advantages that benefit both patients and providers. The main advantages that kiosks offer patients include reduced wait times, the ability to support numerous messaging options that enhance communication between patients and providers, digitized check-in and registration processes which offer convenience, and enhanced security via biometric authentication protocols such as facial recognition technology for user identification, as well as access to telehealth services such as remote consultations.
However, most notable are the advantages that kiosks provide to healthcare practitioners and their teams, those advantages range from reduced administrative costs to expanded access and increased patient satisfaction. These benefits are achieved by embedding innovative features such as self-service check-in and registration, vital signs monitoring, prescription dispensing capability, telemedicine capabilities, etc. What’s more exciting is that medical kiosk manufacturers can customize solutions based on user demand for a broad range of services from collecting patient data through secure authentication to extending further into other arenas such as public health and emergency triage.
Integrations of artificial intelligence (AI) fueled technology have already enabled expanded functionalities like virtual triage systems and intelligent analysis which could be used to improve prioritization of care; while advances in robotic processing automation can free staff from time consuming and repetitive activities related to administrative tasks and clinical workflows.
Improving access to healthcare services
Kiosks are a key component of healthcare digital transformation, accelerating clinical workflows and processes, and refashioning the way people interact with healthcare teams by streamlining the check-in process, reducing wait times, and by extension easing staffing burdens and allowing staff members to dedicate more time to high-value interactions and quality improvement initiatives.
With features like self-service registration, prescription printing, and vital sign monitoring, medical kiosks provide convenient solutions to various healthcare challenges. Their presence helps improve resource utilization while providing a layer of environmental protection against disease transmission at touchpoints throughout a health system.
Innovative Features and Technologies in Medical Kiosks
Self-service check-in and registration
Medical kiosks offer a convenient, efficient, and secure way for patients to check-in. Kiosks allows patients to self-register, reducing wait lines and administrative overhead. Furthermore, the automated process allows for accurate collection of personal data including age, gender and insurance details which would otherwise be prone to human error if done manually.
Aside from improved accuracy and efficiency in the registration process, medical kiosks are helpful when it comes to reducing patient wait times given that check-in can occur anytime including outside of normal operating hours.
Other notable features of medical kiosks are health screening tools, and document scanning options which may accompany the registration process - all which makes the patient experience more streamlined while adhering to important protocols and compliance measures in less time that humanly possible.
Reduced wait times
Medical kiosks are proving to be a powerful tool for reducing wait times in healthcare. The automation implemented with medical kiosks allows patients to quickly and easily check-in, streamlining the entire process. Self-service registration reduces front desk time while also eliminating lines of people waiting for assistance. For example, a study found that kiosk use in emergency departments (ED’s) was associated with a 57% decrease in wait times compared to ED’s without kiosks. Moreover, automated data collection eliminates costly and inefficient paper processes that cause bottlenecks in the registration process.
By reducing these barriers and enabling quicker access to care, medical kiosks can help manage patient expectations and ensure shorter wait times throughout their visits.
Streamlined data collection and use
Medical kiosks are also playing a pivotal role in data collection and use. By digitizing low-value processes, such as registering visitors or entering medical information into an electronic health record (EHR), medical teams can focus on more important tasks such as patient interactions while kiosks do the tedious, repetitive work in the background.
Information captured at these kiosks also aids organizational throughput by furthering clinical data downstream thus helping reduce latency, redundancy, and other inefficient and ineffective workflow elements.
Improved patient-provider communication
Leveraging digital solutions such as medical kiosks to improve communication quality can profoundly impact patient outcomes. Kiosks have been shown to facilitate patient engagement which in turn improves patient-provider communication, a significant driver of health outcomes. In this regard kiosks are instrumental in the elimination of errors and omissions associated with human intervention. In addition to improving efficiencies related to patient handling, and patient-provider communication, kiosks can be customized to include telemedicine capabilities as well as patient education features such as pop-up instructional videos or literature tailored to specific visit types, diagnoses, and or conditions.
Vital signs monitoring
Medical kiosks featuring IoMT technology have enabled a new and innovative approach to vital signs monitoring. These medical kiosks can provide automated measurement of a patient’s height, weight, temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure allowing for greater efficiency while reducing the strain of an overburdened healthcare workforce. Kiosk can also provide monitoring of patients who may not be able to perform self-measurements reliably without assistance such as disabled or elderly individuals.
By automating vital sign measurements using advanced medical kiosk technologies backed by IoMT devices healthcare teams can ensure they are effectively and efficiently accessing real-time data concerning their patient’s health status while also improving accuracy in recording and documenting patient information for optimized treatment and outcomes.
Telemedicine capabilities
Medical kiosks are quickly becoming a mainstay in healthcare, with their ability to provide remote consultations that are playing an invaluable role for patients and providers alike.
Telemedicine capabilities allow medical professionals to conduct assessments remotely, offering the advantage of quality care without respect to geographical location and or distance with quicker response times delivered at significantly lower costs than traditional office visits.
Prescription dispensing
Another way that medical kiosks are quietly transforming the healthcare landscape is by improving prescription dispensing processes. Guided by pharmacy staff kiosks can increase pharmacy access and availability by providing pre-packaged medications for patient pick-up, all while reducing overall expenses.
Enhancing Patient Experience and Efficiency in Healthcare
Medical kiosks enable healthcare organizations to boost patient engagement, streamline processes, and improve operational efficiency.
Future Outlook and Potential Impact of Medical Kiosks
By offering patients more convenience and accessibility kiosks are poised to play a crucial role in the future delivery of care. The integration of advanced technologies such as analytics, AI, and IoMT into healthcare processes has renewed interest in the multi-functional kiosk and as result has fundamentally altered the foundation of healthcare. This automation has also proven to be a cost-effective solution for enhancing patient education and health literacy, the biggest predictor of long-term health outcomes.
Potential for expanding services and functionalities
Medical kiosks have revolutionized the healthcare sector, improving the quality of care, patient experiences, and the accessibility of medical services. As technology continues to develop in this area, the need is mounting to expand medical kiosk capabilities beyond queue optimization to greater seamless, secure, and efficient solutions for healthcare organizations.
Beyond providing more services for less cost, medical kiosks help minimize administrative overhead and reduce the workloads of overextended healthcare workers resulting from staffing shortages. Healthcare organizations must continue to both embrace technological innovations like highly developed healthcare kiosks while also prioritizing human-centered approaches that emphasize positive end-user experiences when utilizing these technologies. This is how and for whom we must realize the full power of digital transformation.
©2023 The Immersive Nurse | All rights reserved.