Last week we had a meeting where I was looking for answers to what hospitals and other medical facilities ask for when they inquire about healthcare kiosks and how they can be implemented within their facilities.
Like most of our interactive kiosk projects, I had a feeling that there had to be various ways healthcare organizations would use our self-service expertise. What I didn’t know was that the desire for healthcare kiosks often starts out with a singular initial need.
Yes, you read that correctly, just one need.
This is where our team steps in to help our healthcare customers understand that these beautiful kiosk machines will exceed your initial expectations by performing countless functions and increasing their value to your organization. Below I will break down the top project requests we receive for healthcare kiosks.
Patient Check In with Qline
One of the biggest requests we receive is for a queue software solution to be partnered with both a computer kiosk for patient check in. Healthcare is a busy industry and it can be incredibly expensive to use your team to handle patient check in procedures. We often see those who work in radiology or laboratory services asking for a software solution like our Qline queuing software.
Patient Check In with Patient Software
Larger healthcare organizations, hospitals, and multiple department medical associates often have their own programs for checking in patients. But even though they have the software, we still receive a lot of requests for the hardware. There are two different ways healthcare organizations reach out to us when they are in need of interactive kiosks:
- The patient check in software already has a check in application already built in. This is not as common as you might think.
- The healthcare organization needs us to create a form to pass the patient data to their software. This is more common, but also more complex in nature.
Safety Benefits of Healthcare Kiosks
Along with checking in patients, hospitals also reach out to us because of safety and security concerns.
Sadly, violence against hospital workers is not an uncommon occurrence, and these horrific acts have led to many requests for an application where everyone entering the hospital checks in to a healthcare kiosk that records their name, address, and who there are there to see. Based on this information, these interactive kiosks will print out an individualized visitor badge for every single patient who walks through the doors.
Some of the same hospitals are also in need of interactive kiosks to run their Vendormate software on to check in all of their vendors.
It is important to note that the same kiosk that is running a visitor check in solution, or Vendormate software, can also provide an interactive building directory on the same interactive kiosk(s). After checking in your visitors and vendors, help them locate where they need to go or call ahead with a VOIP solution so patients or staff know to expect them.
Patient Portals
Healthcare organizations are continuing to improve the way they communicate with their patients, and the way that is the most flexible would be the patient portal. These portals allow patients to have 24/7 access to their medical information. It can be challenging to have patients fill out slips of paper with their information to then hand over to an administrator who manually sets up an account for them. Lately we have had a lot of requests for interactive kiosks that will allow patients to sign themselves up for an account in the patient portal. Kiosks with easy-to-use interfaces like our Zamok Homepage Solution make it easy to sign patients up quickly and without tasking your administrative team with mundane data entry work.
HR Kiosks
We have been talking about patients, visitors and vendors thus far, but we cannot forget the needs of the healthcare staff themselves. Your internal stakeholders and your employees also require the self-service functionalities of interactive employee kiosks, which give your workers the ability to:
- Access their employee profile to make changes to their personal information, such as their name, address, phone number, marital status, or dependents, to mention just a few
- Update their benefits information by printing, scanning and uploading, or emailing forms
- Request and manage paid time off
- Access payroll information and printing pay stubs
- Clock in and out
- Review company communications, and other information through an intranet
- Watch e-learning videos, or policy and procedure updates
- And more!
As you can see, the healthcare industry has a variety of needs for self-service technology and the requests we receive are similar in some ways and completely different in others. That being said, I wrote this piece because I want you to know that your interactive kiosks do not have to be a one trick pony. When considering an interactive kiosk project, imagine all of the ways in which self-service technology can greatly benefit not only your patients, but also your teams.
