Self-Service healthcare: Patients help themselves:

They may not be snatching the scalpel out of their doctor’s hands and doing their own surgery, but patients are registering on their own – in doctors’ offices, clinics and hospitals – thanks to the advent of healthcare kiosks. Taking their cue from airlines, retail stores and banks, healthcare providers are using kiosks to speed up the registration process, enter valuable data into the electronic health record and push revenue cycle management capabilities to the front end – all while advancing the concept of consumer-directed healthcare.

With increasing pressure on healthcare organisations across EMEA to reduce costs, many are looking to new technologies to cut down on manual administration and maximise the productivity of the medical staff. Whilst initial concern might focus on the fact that you are removing human interaction from the encounter, in reality you are actually freeing up time for the staff and clinicians to talk to the patient.

Kiosks aren’t just helpful for self-service check-in and making appointments though. We will also see more and more patients and carers, willing and able to help themselves to the information and self care education they need via a kiosk. By choosing a kiosk solution that incorporates a printer a wide range of information can be dispensed for users to take away from basic maps and directions around the hospital to detailed advice on medical topics.

Kiosks will work in the healthcare setting if they improve the patient experience – including reducing the time spent waiting. Therefore making sure that the technology is easy to use and that where a printer is incorporated that it is robust and requires little intervention is vital.

Kiosks need to be designed with components such as the screen and printer that optimise performance, power usage, space efficiency and reliability. Each project calls for its own blend of kiosk form and function.

Kiosks do, however, make use of commercially available components, principally displays and printers. Reliability and proven success in the kiosk environment should be the guiding factors when evaluating and specifying these components. Solution providers typically make recommendations or have preferred vendors and products they work with, and there is often an ample range of choices.

Printers provide perhaps the most features, options and performance capabilities to choose from. Printer design and features contribute directly to reliability and support requirements. For example, the larger the media capacity, the less often paper has to be replaced, which reduces the chances that a customer will be inconvenienced because the kiosk is out of paper. Larger media capacities also promote better labour efficiency because less staff time is required to load media. Kiosks and printers that are designed to provide easy access for media loading enable more labour efficiency than models that take longer to service.

Decisions made during the design process will impact the time and effort required for successful ongoing operation and the likelihood of patients helping themselves.