Healthcare providers have struggled with how to take proper care for persons served while ensuring their own safety. Digital Revolution in Healthcare industry have had to compete with higher levels of turnover and difficulty in on-boarding and training employees. These struggles have led many healthcare organizations to embrace digital transformation and innovations in behavioral healthcare for remaining agile in an ever-changing landscape.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic early this year, the healthcare industry was in the middle of another critical health battle. In recent decades, patients expect a seamless experience, i.e, combine medication with in-person counseling either one-on-one with a medical expert or as part of a group session.
With an extensive stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders facility, that had become more difficult for those with substance use disorders to get their medication and human interaction they needed to complete their recovery process during the pandemic.
These patients were undergoing regulatory hurdles getting take-home medications and were facing obstacles transitioning mental health services to a video platform i.e., tele-therapy. Offering a virtual engagement option for individuals struggling with mental health or addiction problems can help patients continue recovering remotely.
Making tele-therapy work was ensuring that all of the mandatory documents, HIPAA releases and patient consent forms are prepared, signed and processed compliantly before the start of the treatment. Many of these digital signing documents are essential to maintaining accurate patient health records so that the entire healthcare team can effectively coordinate remotely.
Certinal Digital Signature solution has been playing an important role in the success of this new business environment. Starting from those standard documents, the healthcare team can quickly collect digital signatures in full compliance with HIPAA, ESIGN, and UETA.
“I evaluated many platforms and Certinal eSign was the most robust, comprehensive and well-supported,” said COO of a large Healthcare organization.
Digital revolution in Healthcare industry
Digital transformation in behavioral health and other healthcare services, means adoption of digital technology to find new and better ways to serve people. Tele-health technology is one great example, that enables healthcare providers to offer care to clients no matter where they live. Innovations like these are desperately needed to improve access to healthcare ecosystem.
Some other examples of digital tools elevating healthcare today includes:
By digitally transforming the healthcare provider-client interactions, organizations have been able to offer extensive support to more patients. But digital solutions shouldn’t stop at the healthcare provider-client level. Rather, healthcare organizations need to find ways to better serve their staffs by embracing digital transformation at the organization-staff level. You can create a better culture, increase employee/ client retention, and improve the overall workflows, and all of this will enable you to create a more resilient organization.
Innovations in Behavioral Healthcare and the Path to Digital Transformation
In the healthcare industry, organizations are beginning to understand the importance of digitization. The digital transformation of your organization, however, must not be treated as a quick fix, instead, treat it as a journey. The path to digital transformation and innovation in behavioral health is well worth taking but will likely have a few hurdles along the way. To map your organization’s path, consider the following four steps outlined:
- Determine where your healthcare organization needs to go and how ‘digitally mature’ it is in current times.
- Decide on the level of digital maturity your healthcare organization needs to reach in order to achieve its current goals.
- Begin moving toward the set digital maturity goal, making note of the wins and losses your healthcare organization derives along the way.
- Take time to review what went right and what went wrong and re-iterate the process and it’s the only key to success in digital transformation efforts.
By following these steps, your organization can undergo its own digital transformation, allowing you to be more agile in the face of change. Opting for digital transformation in behavioral health settings will allow more organizations to cope with the changes and evolve quickly.
A large healthcare provider moves to virtual care
For many years, tele-health has been leading the charge for digital transformation in healthcare. Innovative healthcare practitioners have used telecommunication technology to meet with individuals who otherwise couldn’t receive care for decades now. To start with telephone-based appointments, these specialists have adapted their practices to include video conferencing capabilities and other cutting-edge digital tools to expand their practice and increase the level of care offered to its clients.
A healthcare organization, the world’s leading non-profit focused on individuals, families and communities affected by drug addiction, is a major provider of substance abuse treatment and mental health services. To help more patients on their paths to recovery, they set a goal of expanding virtual care services. Achieving that goal meant establishing an electronic signature platform that would scale across the nation and integrate with its electronic medical records system to transform it’s manual processes into a paperless one as well as to tackle with the urgent requirement of digital consent documents in the facility.
The organization acted immediately to adopt Certinal digital signature solution for treating patients via virtual care sessions. In only a week, the team trained 100+ staff members on Certinal eSign, allowing them to provide virtual care in various states. In only the first three weeks, more than 5000 envelopes were sent using Certinal eSign.
“Certinal eSign has been an absolute lifesaver for us. I honestly can’t imagine there would be another solution that would be as easy to use, implement and that would meet our needs like Certinal eSign has,” said the organization’s director of clinical applications.
Building Organizational Resilience Through Digital Transformation & Leading the Way to Innovations in Behavioral Healthcare
Resilient organizations plan and invest for disruption, and can adapt, sustain, and rebound quickly. In behavioral health and healthcare services, two of the biggest difficulties organizations face when adopting new-age technologies are:
- Staff resistance/ Staff empowerment
- Knowledge gaps around how to use these next-generation digital tools
While there may be some push-back to adopting a digital tool, don’t let this block your efforts for digital transformation in healthcare. Digital signature platforms has been a crucial tool in the digital transformation journey in this new business environment. It is also important to make sure to provide your staffs with the flexibility to fully understand and integrate these digital technologies into their daily workflow which in turn supports in embracing digital transformation and other innovations in behavioral healthcare to remain resilient.
Certinal is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Zycus, the pioneer in Cognitive Procurement. A familiar name and market leader with years of experience in managing critical contracts & agreements, Zycus boasts of over Fortune 1000 enterprise clients and deployments of procurement and sourcing suite of products. Digital Signing has always been a focus area for Zycus.
Thus, Certinal was born with the stated goal of offering a best-in-class Digital Transaction Management solution that will be easy-to-use, 100% secure to deploy, and legally compliant around the world. We stand committed to providing a one-stop solution to large enterprise customers, compliant with various security standards and conforming to different regional regulations. Improving the patient experience to drive greater efficiency for your healthcare practices is as simple as streamlining the manual processes that affects your patients, physicians, and employees.
Spend more time with patients, not manual processes. Learn more about Certinal’s healthcare solutions. There has never been a better time to upgrade your current eSignature process or implement HIPAA-compliant digital signatures. See what the best digital signature technology can do for your business by scheduling a demo.
