One of the most daunting undertakings for any organization, getting a true handle on forms can make even the strongest of managers feel like breaking down.
Whether it's developing, implementing and monitoring a process for new forms or working on re-designing them for an electronic world, it's very time consuming and thankless project, but one of the most important things you can do to ensure compliance, as well as it being a necessary first step.
Today, we'll talk about form design and re-design in the context of preparing for implementing a document imaging solution. To achieve a successful outcome, you'll need the following 5 things.
1. Time
That's right, the most important factor is the time necessary to complete the project. At one of the hospitals I worked with, it took myself and my teammate almost a full business week to go through all the forms and create a document library of what forms the organization even had. We did multiple 'asks' and meetings with all departments to obtain any and all forms they had. Going one-by-one to enter them into a spreadsheet and capture the important information such as form name, department in use, etc was messy and long, but it was a key brick in the foundation for a successful go-live.
2. Barcodes
The backbone of document imaging is barcodes. Barcode the patient label, barcode the form, and let the system do it's work and take the guesswork and potential problems out of the human hands. Barcoding forms is a fairly simple process, but there needs to be some logic behind it. For example, on the off chance that the barcode is unreadable, or if you have to hand key in the form because it doesn't have a barcode, you want your most heavily used forms to have easy numbers so the staff can quickly ten-key them in. For example, if you are using three digit barcodes, and your progress note form is very heavily used, you may want to make it 111 so that any staff could quickly key that in if need be. If you have a detox form that is rarely used, making it 829 isn't as big of a deal because you don't see it enough.
3. Fast Tracking Old Forms
Hopefully, you have some sort of forms committee or process in place, but as you do your forms library you may find that there are tons of forms that are old, outdated, pilots or home grown and are needed for continuity of services, however, you can't wait to send them through the monthly process of forms committee since they are already in use. You need a way to ensure that you can quickly get these types of forms standardized and approved.
4. Templates
Templates are key. You need to ensure form standardization so that you can have better control over them. This means not only that you should, to the best of your ability, have designated places on every form for where the barcode and patient label go, but also that the template for new forms is standard so that if the GI clinic wants to create a new form, they don't just try to make one out of Word, but instead have an organizational template that ensures the proper formatting.
5. Patience
As I've said, all these steps take time. Some take a lot of time and will require multiple reviews and reworks over days, weeks and months to ensure you have the right set. For example, at one hospital, we started with over 800 forms after our initial pass, but by go-live we were down to only about 450. Again, this is a thankless job, but incredibly important.
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