Patient Intake Management 2020: The Good, the Bad, and the COVID-19

In any medical setting, the patients should come first. That is handled in a big way by the products that take care of patient intake management in ambulatory centers and clinics. These products have seen even greater importance placed on them recently with the onset of COVID-19 and all of the ramifications to medicine and patient care that came with it. KLAS’ new Patient Intake Management 2020 report dives into who provides these solutions and, more importantly, who is adapting in this critical time.

Big, Bad COVID-19

Of all the areas in the ambulatory setting with the need to rapidly evolve due to COVID-19, patient intake is certainly one of the top candidates. Now more than ever, it is important for providers in the ambulatory setting to have a solution that will help keep patients safe by social distancing, reducing staff-patient contact, and, most crucially, providing functionality related to COVID-19. Luckily, it seems that many of the vendors in this space got the memo and put in the work. For example, during our work on this report, we were impressed to see that many vendors actually stepped up by creating brand-new sets of screening questions to facilitate check-ins during the pandemic. This helped patients reduce their usage of the in-office screens and tablets. The best vendors made a tangible impact with things like this, and as the chart below shows, there tends to be a correlation between a vendor’s overall performance and their COVID-19 response:

Vendors Who Are Doing Great

Based on this graph, there are some obvious leaders in the patient intake space, and these leaders are all doing quite a bit to maintain those top spots and provide for their customers. Several of these vendors didn’t charge their customers for the COVID-19-related functionality that was rolled out; in other words, these top vendors didn’t take advantage of the situation and their customers. Instead, these vendors focused on customer success and it paid off in a big way. Now we are seeing their ratings and scores rising up through the satisfaction ranks when compared to the last time KLAS did a report like this. One of the big focuses for this segment revolves around how a solution drives office efficiencies. That is at the heart of why providers even get these solutions. In this report, we call out the vendors that really stand out for increasing and pushing office efficiencies, which translate to tangible outcomes, less paper, and more payments collected at the point of care. Big players here include Epion Health, Epic, and Phreesia, who continue to be dominating forces in terms of the breadth of functionality that they offer.

Vendors Who Are Doing Less Than Great

Unfortunately, we saw some vendors' customer experience and scores fall a bit. Some of these vendors are going through turbulent times with COVID-19 or acquisitions, and these factors can certainly affect the quality of product and service delivery. Products have been overpromised and not delivered on, and support has fallen short. However, it is our hope that we will see things turn around for these vendors and that things will settle down and smooth out over time. After all, the more success we see for the vendors, the more that success can translate to provider wins down the line.

An Ever-Growing Market

Patient intake has clearly grown into a very crucial piece of the ambulatory ecosystem. This market is expanding. It is already overlapping with patient engagement and patient outreach, and it will only continue to gain ground and build up speed as time goes on. That is why it is more important than ever for providers to know which vendors are doing their best, especially with the pandemic still in full swing. KLAS’ report covers a good breadth of vendors, including some new vendors that have made themselves known in recent years. It is our hope that this report will inspire readers to pursue more of this information and make the best decisions for their practices. 

Photo Credit: Adobe Stock, DC Studios