Healthcare identity solutions company CrossChx Inc has announced the nationwide launch of its Queue check-in kiosks, which streamline the process of patient registration at hospitals while also providing valuable data analytics and increased security.

Few things feel more like Purgatory than sitting in a hospital waiting room as you complete your fifth “spot the difference” puzzle in a crumpled copy of Highlights Magazine. What’s your place in line? How fast is your doctor calling in patients? Wait, didn’t you get here thirty minutes before the guy they just called?

While modern medicine may be advancing by leaps and bounds, the first experience most patients have when they arrive at the hospital is roughly the same as it has been for the last few decades. Sign your name, take a clipboard, and wait for an indeterminate amount of time for your name to be called.

“This is the tip of the spear of things that are problematic for the patient experience,” CrossChx CEO Sean Lane told me.

While CrossChx may not be able to give you new Highlights to read, it is making the check-in and wait process a little more bearable with its Queue kiosks.

Queue’s electronic sign-in process takes about as much time as writing your name on a clipboard, but Queue tracks each patient by a unique ID that helps prevent duplicates and misidentification. It also allows patients to see the current average wait time and to monitor their place in line.

One of Queue’s primary aims is to improve the patient experience, but it also benefits the hospitals themselves by providing valuable patient progression data. The Queue kiosks can provide registrars with a number of useful analytics that can be used to track average wait times, trends in patient volume over time, and more.

Lane explained that not only does this allow different departments to be held accountable for their wait times in a positive way, it can also help hospitals make decisions in staffing and other areas.

The importance of patient identity

Lane explained that there are two clipboards patients deal with that CrossChx wants to eliminate. The first is the sign-in sheet, which Lane says Queue has already replaced. The second clipboard is the patient’s health history information, and Lane said CrossChx is currently working on a solution for that.

A common problem faced by hospital registrars is the misidentification of patients. With the old-fashioned clipboard method, it can be easy to pull the wrong patient’s records, especially when a hospital might have a few hundred John Smiths in its database, some of which might even be the same person with duplicate entries.

While being misidentified during check-in is often an annoying hassle that only results in more waiting, it can sometimes have much more serious consequences. According to Lane, over 100,00 people die in the U.S. every year as a result from complications caused by misidentification.

“We alert hospitals to over 100,000 errors in patient information,” Lane said. “And unfortunately, we haven’t seen those numbers going down. In fact, as we have continued to grow, we have only seen how bad the system really is now and how bad the consequences for errors can be.”

Image courtesy of CrossChx Inc