Frequently Overlooked Forms Management and the Value of EHR Integration

When a CIO looks at their healthcare organization, they see hundreds of opportunities to improve their processes and better leverage technology.  Balancing all of those competing IT projects that can provide value to their organization and improve the workflow for clinicians and patients is what makes being a CIO so challenging.

One example of a project that often gets overlooked, yet can provide value to staff and patients, is taking a look at all the forms being used across your organization.  What people often don’t realize is that forms spread like wildfire in an organization.  It makes sense why.  Pretty much anyone can create a form and print it off.  It’s not like other technology that has to go through committees and tech experts to be implemented.  The slow creep of form proliferation is a real thing in almost every healthcare organization.

This was the reality for Carl Smith, CIO at King’s Daughters Medical Center, who shared about their experience with forms at the HIMSS 2021 Annual Conference in Las Vegas.  Before consolidating their forms and making them all digital, they had 2,500 paper forms in use.  After digitizing and consolidating those forms, they were able to reduce them to 1,000 digital forms.