Slickest Solution I Saw at HIMSS15

This probably says something about me, but I’m always intrigued by really slick solutions that leverage creativity to solve a problem. While at HIMSS amidst all the vendor noise, I saw a solution that I fits this description. The solution came from a scanning company called Ambir and the solution is called nForm. Yes, I was a bit surprised that it came from a scanner company too, but that’s the beauty of HIMSS. You never know where you going to find something interesting.

In any office, one of the biggest annoyances during an EHR implementation is that you can’t go fully electronic. There are still a large number of forms that require a patient signature. In 95% of cases this means that you’re handing the patient a stack of paper forms which they can sign. Most organizations then scan those forms into their EHR. It makes for an awful workflow and we all know it.

The nForm solution from Ambir solves this problem and makes the process electronic. You can literally scan in any form and nForm will make that paper form an electronic form that can be completed electronically on an iOS, Android or the nForm 410x tablet device. The patient can literally fill out the form on the screen as if they were filling out the form on paper. Then, once the patient completes the form, nForm will upload it to your EHR using the same workflow you’d been using when you’d scan the form into your EHR.
nForm
To me the most powerful part of this solution is that it uses your paper form workflow without requiring any sort of new integration from your EHR vendor. Even if you usually print out your intake forms from your EHR, you can “print” them to nForm and then when the patient fills out the forms they’ll get pushed back to the EHR. If you’re a clinic that just has a stack of intake paperwork that you attach to a clipboard for the patient, you can have those already queued up on nForm and just hand the tablet to the patients to complete.

While I’ve talked about the intake forms, you can also use this for other forms you might need signed later in the office visit as well. We all know those pesky consent for treatment forms that we’re still doing on paper and hopefully scanning in later.

I love that this is a slick solution for healthcare, but I’m also interested in the product for my own personal use. The only things I print these days are when I need to sign something. How much nicer will it be for me to just print to nForm, sign it and then send it to the receiving party? Saves the hassle of going to the printer. Saves ink and paper which will make all you eco friendly people happy.

While nForm supports you writing anything on a form (it literally is like an electronic piece of paper), I’m skeptical about how well it will do for a really detailed form. Obviously in healthcare we’re moving these forms to a patient portal so we can get the granular data elements stored as unique data elements. So, we’re not handing a patient a lengthy paper form as much anymore.

With that said, I’m not sure how a lengthy health history form would look using nForm. People’s bad handwriting together with the digital input might make it hard to read. For signatures or basic forms it won’t be an issue at all. Plus, they’ve made it so the virtual pen color is different from the background of the form. It’s actually really easy to look at a form and see what was completed (or not completed) by the patient. In that way, it makes the form more legible than a paper form. Although, it still depends on the quality of their handwriting.

All in all, I’m really impressed with the nForm solution. I’ve implemented a Topaz style signature pad solution before, but that required integration with the EHR (which very few have done) and still felt awkward since you weren’t actually signing on the document itself. nForm has all the advantages of the paper form, but in a nice electronic solution. I love slick solutions like this.

Full Disclosure: Ambir is a Healthcare Scene advertiser.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • John,
    We did not go to HIMSS, but we have been recommending the Ambir scanners to our clients for awhile now. We have developed our own OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) solution to be used with our Clinical Navigator EHR. We are in the process of working with Ambir and their Nform solution so we can push the form out to the tablet and allow the patient to “mark” the form without printing anything. The form then imports directly to our ScanStation modality within Clinical Navigator and Presto! Our system will read the barcode and the marked “circles” on the form just like it would have from a piece of paper. That data then imports directly to our EHR. Advantages: No printing of the form to begin with, no scanning by staff, no shredding of the forms after they have been scanned. Not to mention the “cool” factor.
    When we get this up and running in full swing at a client site, i’ll let you know! Perhaps you can feature it in your blog.

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