Self-Service Kiosks Help Hospital Reduce Patient Wait Times, Paperwork, And Anxiety
When patients of Newark Beth Israel Medical Center check in for same-day surgery or preadmission testing, they no longer need to wait a half-hour or more to be called by hospital registration workers to complete paperwork.
That’s because in April, the 671-bed teaching hospital in Newark, N.J., rolled out self-service kiosks, or MediKiosks, from vendor Galvanon Inc. The kiosks speed up the check-in process, gather necessary signatures, and can even collect co-payments, says Newark Beth Israel Medical Center VP and CIO Angelo Schittone.
Not only is the new automated check-in process quicker and more efficient, it greatly reduces the amount of cumbersome registration paperwork needed, not to mention patient anxiety levels that tend to mount when people need to wait before a medical procedure, Schittone says.