Advance Health Directive Form

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Introduction

Did you know that 92% of people believe that end-of-life care is essential, but sadly only 32% actually take the measures pertaining to the same?

Being able to improve the quality of life of a patient who suffers from a life-limiting illness is among the most critical jobs in the healthcare domain. All healthcare professionals must take this aspect of care seriously and implement whatever measures necessary to ensure a better quality of life for all their patients. A great way to ensure that their patients’ preferences are honored is to document their preferences. An Advance Health Directive Form is a legal document that provides instructions for medical care if the patient loses the ability to make their own health decisions at some point in their lives.

What is an Advance Health Directive Form?

All patients have the right to give instructions regarding their care. This includes giving or refusing consent to a certain form of care, selecting or discharging healthcare providers, approving or disapproving procedures, and donating organs or tissues. All of this is documented in an Advance Health Directive Form that needs to be filled out by the patients receiving care for a certain physical or medical condition.

An Advance Health Directive Form is a legal document that is used by healthcare providers to document the patient’s preferences related to the way they wish to be taken care of if they lose the ability to make their own decisions. This form typically includes the details of the patient, the healthcare provider or agent delivering care, the preferences of the patient regarding procedures or after-life care, and their written consent.

Advanced care planning is important to be prepared for the future. Advance Health Directive Form is the ideal way to ensure that the patient’s decisions about their medical condition are being documented properly and taken into consideration while providing medical care.

Why should you digitize the Advance Health Directive Form?

If you’re a staff member or a front desk person taking care of all the paperwork of your patients; we don’t need to remind you of how much time and effort it takes to get each form completed and signed in due time. There are unnecessary delays because each of the paper forms that you get filled and signed need to be scanned and uploaded into the EMR.

Let’s say a patient steps into your clinic and before they meet the doctor, you give them a stack of forms to fill and sign. Imagine their state of mind during that time. If they had filled out the form before visiting the clinic, all the formalities could have been taken care of well in advance, and diagnosis and treatment procedures could have been discussed right away. Filling the form on the spot wastes the patient’s time and also causes delays in diagnosis and treatment. On top of that, you also had to spend a lot of time getting all the paperwork done.

Imagine if you could save all those hours of manual work by simply digitizing this entire process!

Providing efficient and exceptional care to patients is every medical professional’s topmost priority and to deliver such care, you need to make sure that every step of your patient’s journey is well thought out and seamless. Here are some benefits of digitizing the Advance Health Directive Form:

Less manual work: You need not scan and upload every form individually; all the forms can be easily stored on your database.
Lesser chances of error: Since the patient has to fill this form at their convenience without any hurry, there will be fewer chances of error.
Save time: You’ll be able to save 3-4 hours every day since you won’t have to get forms filled and signed. You can direct this time towards something more important at hand.
Less re-work: If there is something that needs to be changed in the Advance Health Directive Form, you don’t need to get another form filled, you can simply ask the patient to edit the details in the form and send it back to you.
Improved patient flow: Since you wouldn’t have patients sitting in the waiting room and filling up forms anymore, you can easily manage the flow of patients throughout the day.
Integrations: Digitizing the form means syncing it with your healtgcare software in order to make documentation seamless and less cumbersome. This further leads to more streamlined operations and more time saved.
Easy access: In case the providers or the patient’s family members need to refer to the Advance Health Directive Form in the future, they can easily access it in the EHR.

All you need to do to avail of the aforementioned benefits is to send a secure text message to your patient with the form link and ask them to fill it out before coming for the appointment. A simple text message would do. Here’s an example:

“Hello {{firstName}}, It’s Dr. Tan. Just wanted to remind you that your completed intake forms are due today. We sent you a text and an email with the forms earlier. Here is the link for your reference again: Please email back the completed forms. Feel free to ignore, them if they are already completed.”

How should you digitize the Advance Health Directive Form? 5 Best practices to follow

Send the form before the appointment: Make sure that you send the link to the Advance Health Directive Form to your patient a couple of days before the appointment. Doing so will give the patient ample time to fill out the form.
Give a deadline: Don’t allow the patient too much time to fill out the form. Give them a date and a time to submit the form. This will act as an added responsibility for the patient to complete the paperwork in due time.
Follow up: Make sure to follow up with your patients to fill out the form and ask them if they have any questions regarding the same.
Send reminders: You can send automated reminders to your patients reminding them to fill out the Advance Health Directive Form before their appointment to avoid any delays. Give them the responsibility to fill out their paperwork.
Make the forms device-friendly: Don’t overcomplicate the process of accessing and filling the forms. Ensure to keep them compatible with all kinds of devices. This will improve the overall patient experience.

How can you digitize your Advance Health Directive Form with Emitrr?

Here’s how Emitrr can help improve the process for you:

You can use the Advance Health Directive Form template available and customize it as per your preferences, download it, and send it to the patients or.
You can set up automation to send out form links to your patients via text or email and even follow up with them.
You can sync the forms that have been completed to your EHR, thereby eliminating the headache of scanning paper forms and manually entering data.
You can digitize every step of filling out the form such as entering contact information, adding ID proofs, uploading photographs and signatures, uploading insurance information, and adding payment methods. You need not do all of this manually.

Note:

Remember that the Advance Health Directive Form is different for each state. So make sure to keep your jurisdiction in mind and tweak the form template available here as per your state laws.

Case study

NF Urgent Care, an urgent care center based in New York was facing problems with the patient intake process as it involved a lot of manual work. Emitrr helped digitize the entire process for them, and they were able to save more than 90 hours of manual work. The entire patient registration process was streamlined and the staff was able to send out digital forms to the patients before their appointments, which further simplified patient intake and reduced errors. All that time saved could be used to provide more personalized care to the patients. Checkout the entire story here: https://emitrr.com/customer-stories/niagra-falls-urgent-care/

Need to know if Emitrr integrates with your EHR/EMR? Check it out here: https://emitrr.com/integrations/

Are you looking for a quick and easy way to digitize your medical forms? Well, Emitrr is all you need! Reach out to us and save time and effort for your practice.