The definitive
guide toeSignatures
for healthcare

Contents
1. Introduction: Healthcare’s digital leap

2. Deliver a better patient experience

3. Reduce paperwork for frontline staff

4. Onboard healthcare workers faster

5. Reduce errors and back-office admin

6. Compliance and security 7. How eSignature APIs takes digitized healthcare to the next level

There’s no denying
new technologies
and the pandemic
have changed theway we seek out,

One of the largest shifts being a move towards lower-risk telehealth, forwhich private insurance claims increased an astounding 4,347%

receive, andadminister
healthcare.

between March 2019 and March 2020. 

But increased healthcare digitization isn’t without its challenges; areas
like administrative tasks and paperwork are slow to catch up. 

Put simply, digital healthcare is full of half-measures that just get thejob done but don’t do it in the best way for employees or patients. 

As Sarjoo Patel, Founder of Beam Healthcare, explains, "During COVID,
the use of digital technology to provide clinical care was high, asexpected. A lot of the clinicians have accepted telemedicine and othertools to improve care and efficiencies at their clinics or health systems.
However, the administrative workflow side of healthcare continues tolag with paper-pushing, redundant forms, and snail-mail."

The problem is, when workflows become afragmented mix of digital and analog, it adds
another layer of admin for your employees as
they manually move information betweensystems—which is both time-consuming anderror-prone.
For healthcare providers, this loss of efficiency translates into moretime doing administrative tasks and less time helping patients. 

But with the help of eSignature technology, healthcare providers can
Deliver a better patient experience by limiting the paperwork theyneed to fill out in person
Reduce the amount of paperwork front-line healthcare workers
need to manage for each patient so they can see more patients
Hire healthcare workers faster with streamlined credentialing
processes
Limit errors and reduce paperwork-related costs.

So here it is, yourguide to improving
the patient
experience andreducing theadministrative loadon employees witheSignatures.

Deliver a better patientexperienceNo healthcare provider wants to keep patients waiting. With alreadylong wait times, patient paperwork adds even more delays to an
already trying experience. And when 30% of around 700 surveyed
patients report that they’ve walked out of an appointment due to along wait, and 20% said they’ve changed doctors because of wait
times, that’s a big problem.

But while filling out forms is an unavoidable part of healthcare, youcan speed up the time it takes to collect the necessary information
and authorization with eSignatures.

By digitizing your document and signing workflows, you can do awaywith a massive part of the slow, manual paperwork involved inonboarding, discharging, and insurance claims processing.

For instance, instead of having patients fill out onboarding
documentation when they arrive, patients or caregivers can read andsign forms digitally over email or on your website before they arrive.

In addition, patients can also sign some forms after they leave. Digital
insurance claims, for instance, don’t require an in-person or lengthy
print, sign, scan, send process and can be completed at a later date.

The faster you can get all the relevant patient forms filled out andsigned, the less waiting your patients have to do pre- or postappointment.

Documents ripe foreSignature adoption
New patient forms 

Claims processing 

Deliver the seamless, efficient experience your patients expect anddeserve by enabling them to fill out new patient and consent forms
ahead of time, on their own mobile device or computer.

Increase claims processing efficiency and reduce costswith a fully electronic prior authorization process.

Patient care coordination 

Medical approvals 

Offer patients a seamless experience throughout their entire carejourney, by digitizing medical record updates, transition of caredocuments, consent forms, and discharge forms.

Make sure every patient’s signature for any medical
procedure or receipt of any medication is a legally
enforceable document.

Integrating digital workflows for these documents means you’ll no longer need to print out or scan each document. And you caneasily store them electronically for future reference.

In addition, patients can also sign some forms after they leave. Digital insurance claims, for instance, don’t require
an in-person or lengthy print, sign, scan, send process and can be completed at a later date.

The faster you can get all the relevant patient forms filled out and signed, the less waiting your patients have todo pre- or post-appointment.

Reduce paperwork for frontline staff

Healthcare workers often find themselves neck-deep in

administrative forms—provider agreements, medical director

agreements, resident onboarding, physician continuing, medical

education exhibits, and more. It’s a large reason why doctors only

spend an average of 27% of the workday with patients.

“Paperwork takes at least 15 to 20 minutes after every consultation

or appointment . It doesn't sound like that much but if you're

meeting 100 patients a day and spending 15 minutes on paperwork

for every patient, it adds up fast . In fact, that's one of the major

causes of burnout,” says Sailee Bhambere, Senior Clinical Pathways

Manager at Day to Day Health. 

And for healthcare facilities, which are often understaffed, this levelof paperwork can compromise the quality of care for patients andlimit the number of patients they can see.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.
You can reduce the amount of timeconsuming paperwork that burdens
staff by digitizing and automating
several slow paper processes.

Frontline staff shouldn’t be wasting their time with printers andscanners, but the manual print, sign, scan, send process often

forces them into a time-consuming runaround just to sign

documents.

Simply by making your forms digital, you remove a number of steps

from the paperwork process—saving them time that could bebetter used with patients.

eSignature tools can even automate duplicate data fields acrossdocuments, saving your frontline staff even more time. Instead offilling out the same information, like name, address, or date of birthon every single document, once the information is filled out once, it

automatically populates on every other form—so frontline staff only

need to review the details and then sign.

Onboard healthcare
workers faster
Between 2015 and 2019, the typical health facility churned 89%

And slow hiring doesn’t just lead to understaffed andof its workforce. And that’s only set to get worse as theoverworked teams, hiring, training, filling temporary

healthcare workforce lost more than 500,000 workers in 2020.

vacancies is expensive, too—the average replacement cost

Couple that with an average of 49 days to hire a new healthcareof full-time registered nurse totals $36,567.

employee, and it’s no wonder hospitals and clinics are sofrequently understaffed.

With a few tweaks to the hiring process, healthcare
providers can speed up the time it takes to hire new staff -So what’s the cause of such a slow hiring process? When

helping deliver better care, reducing stress on employees,

clinics are forced to juggle so many tasks, patients, documents,and lowering the cost of hiring. 

and communications, the hiring process inevitably slows down.

By digitizing and automating many of the duplicate fields

As Sailee explains, “Rules and regulations could be a bitin all the hiring forms new workers fill out, you can reducecomplicated. So in the US, for instance, every state will havethe amount of time it takes to fill out, distribute, and signdifferent requirements and different licenses. If you'rehiring documents. 

practicing in one state, your license is not valid in anotherstate.”

Customer story

How Flow Healthcare saves Beam Healthcare $600 per

employee with Dropbox’s eSignature product called Dropbox Sign
For Flow’s customer, Beam Healthcare—a supplier of doctors to remotehospitals and online telemedicine services—hiring healthcare
professionals was full of paper forms that needed the same
information again and again. 

As Sarjoo explains, “When Beam hired a provider, they had to fill out
an application for the company and run all the appropriate
background/reference checks. But then, in order to get this same
employee working at 3 or 5 different healthcare facilities, they had tofill out facility-specific new employee applications and go throughvarious checks again. You can imagine the administrative burden on
the provider and administrative staff to move all this paperwork
forward. This archaic process is a point of frustration in clinicians andat times avoid getting credentialed/privileged at multiple facilities. If
we want to improve access to care then healthcare must focus onprocesses besides just producing more provide.”

To make things worse, if a hospital is a big institution with satellite
clinics, doctors have to fill out the same paperwork and undergo thesame background checks for each of those facilities, too.

That’s when Flow turned to Dropbox Sign to reduce the number ofduplicate form fields doctors had to complete when working at otherhospitals. Flow implemented automated templates using the Dropbox
Sign API. “The paper application forms that hospitals need aretemplated out[…]. So when a hospital asks for them, they'reautomatically filled out using the HelloSign [now Dropbox Sign] API
integration which is connected to our database. The doctor just reads
the document and signs off on it. So once they're onboarded, they
don't have to manually fill out additional documents,” says Sarjoo.

Using the Dropbox Sign API to auto-populate documents and reduce
the need for doctors to fill in paperwork multiple times helped Flow’s
client Beam reduce the time its staff spent on administrative
paperwork by 50% and save an estimated $600 per employee.

“This archaic process is a point offrustration in clinicians and at times avoid
getting credentialed/privileged at multiple
facilities. If we want to improve access tocare then healthcare must focus onprocesses besides just producing more
provide.”— Sarjoo Patel, Founder of Beam Healthcare

Reduce errors and back-office admin

Just as important as patient and hiring
documents are operational ones. Without them,
how can you manage patients or procure medical
supplies?

But just because they’re important doesn’t mean
they should take up all of your teams’ time—
which it often does, with office workers spendingaround 69 days a year on administrative tasks.
And it’s in large part down to preparing andsending individual documents—and especiallyprepping the same documents again and again.

However, by digitizing your paper-heavy workflows, you can
not only speed up the paperwork process but reduce thechance of errors, reduce costs on storage, and keep a lasting
record of documentation. That’s precisely what eSignature
tools do.

Reduced errors

Most errors occur when information is double or triple
handled—that is, a paper document is typed into a machineby another person.

But when the document is digital from the get-go, like withdigitized eSignature forms, there’s no chance of typing errors
slipping into your records.

Save on storage
Printing costs medical facilities a ton. The average 1,500-bed
hospital prints more than 8 million pages per month, costingaround $3.8 million per year. In addition, storing all thisinformation demands space and costs even more.

But with eSignatures, once the processing is complete,
documents are securely stored in the cloud. That means
there’s no chance of misplacing them, and your staff canretrieve or forward them from anywhere at any time.

The average 1,500-bed
hospital prints morethan 8 million pages per

Keep important records ingood shape
Physical documents degrade over time, making it difficult to
produce accurate documents during audits. 

But because everything is digital with eSignature tools,
whenever you need to pull up a document, it is still in its
original signing condition. Plus, it makes it easy to sharewith patients fast. Instead of waiting for documents to arrivein the post or collecting them in person, you can securely
send important documents in an instant.

month, costing around$3.8 million per year.

Dropbox Sign security and HIPAAcompliant forms

Compliance andsecurity
Cyber threats against healthcare providers are persistentand on the rise. Great Plains Health, a hospital that serves
183,000+ patients a month, blocks around 10,000 attempts
to access its servers every day.

The threats are real and so are the fines for failing to protect
your patients’ information—HIPAA violations reach up to$25,000 per violation.

That’s why you need to be sure whatever tools you’re using
to send, collect, and store documents are secure andhealthcare compliant.

Dropbox Sign encrypts every document andstores it in a SOC 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type I, andISO 27001 certified data center. Access to thisdata center is strictly controlled by security
staff equipped with video surveillance, multistep authentication, and state-of-the-art
intrusion detection systems.

Dropbox Sign also helps achieve sustainable
compliance with federal medical loss-ratio
regulations, HIPAA, and the ACA (Affordable
Care Act).

Its policies, procedures, and infrastructure
support customers’ need to be HIPAA compliant.
There is no certification around HIPAA, so forassurance purposes, we got an assessment
completed from an independent third party toensure compliance to Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Security Standard.

Customer story

How healthcare company VolitionRx securely signs and stores documentswith Dropbox Sign and Dropbox integration
With 60 employees, across Europe, Asia, and the Americas,
VolitionRx needed to find a way to keep its 20,000-square-foot lab
open, liaise with corporate staff working at home, and fulfill
regulatory requirements while employees worked from homethroughout the pandemic.

Wanting to reduce the burden of paperwork, Daniel Halter, Group IT
Manager at VolitionRx, turned to Dropbox Sign to digitize thesignature process. “We needed an eSignature solution that wasrepeatable and scalable, that could be used across different timezones and languages, and which didn’t rely on on-premise IT
systems that are difficult to maintain, “ says Daniel Halter, Group IT
Manager at VolitionRx.

And like all businesses in the healthcare industry, VolitionRx takes
data security very seriously. Creating and validating nucleosomicsbased cancer tests creates masses of protected medical data thatmust be secured and signed off every time it’s used or shared. 

Already using Dropbox Business to securely connect remote labteams and employees, Daniel says integrating Dropbox Sign was ano-brainer. “The less you deviate from a worker’s line of sight, themore efficient a tool will be. Using HelloSign [now Dropbox Sign]
directly through Dropbox means there’s no need to switch between
apps, it doesn’t impact workflows, and it’s much easier to use. The
whole process is streamlined and integrated.”

VolitionRx employees now use Dropbox Sign to share and sign all
medical data release forms, fair practice agreements, as well asinternal documents. With signed documents saved automatically in
Dropbox, audit trails are easy to follow, and sharing documents withexternal regulatory bodies is simplified.

And according to Daniel, the Dropbox Sign integration with
Dropbox Business means uptake has been high amongst
employees, with the need for little to no training.

How eSignature APIs takes
digitized healthcare to thenext level
You’ve heard how eSignatures are helping healthcare
providers deliver better patient experiences, reduce
employee admin, and lower costs. But it’s just the tip of
the iceberg. By integrating eSignatures into your digital
workflows, via API, you can refine and control signing
even more to deliver improved experiences for patientsand employees. 

No person wants to spend more time signing paper
documents. You want to make signing as simple aspossible for patients and doctors so they can spend moreon treatment. And that’s exactly what eSignature APIs
can deliver. By embedding eSignatures directly into yourwebsite or app, patients and staff can securely sign in
one single workflow—no need to print or use clunky tools.

What’s more, eSignature APIs are helping healthcare
providers maintain the trusted relationships they’ve built.
Patients want to know their sensitive personal informationis going to the healthcare provider they trust. That is,patients want to know they’re interacting directly with you.
eSignature APIs help build trust too. How? Because they’recompletely customizable, which means you can make every
document and signing workflow complexly custom-brandedwith your exact logo, color, font, and more. That way
patients are always interacting with the brand they know
and trust.

Check out the Dropbox Sign API’s industry-leading setup.
With user-friendly documentation, a library of SDKs, and atechnical support team behind you, integrating the Dropbox
Sign eSignature API only takes an average of 2.5 days.

Digitized healthcare is here. Are you ready?
The events of COVID have placed digitization front ofmind for the medical world. 

And this digitization isn’t just good for patients, it’s anopportunity for healthcare facilities to deliver a better
experience for healthcare workers, and administrative
staff by limiting the risk, burden, and repetition ofpaperwork.

But to deliver on that promise, healthcare facilities
need secure, compliant tools they can rely on. And
that’s just what eSignatures deliver.

If you’re ready to start using eSignatures in yourhealthcare facility, book a demo with our expert APIteam.

About Dropbox Sign
Dropbox Sign, a Dropbox company, simplifies work for millions of individuals. Companies
all over the world rely on our eSignature solutions to power their applications, making iteasier to close deals faster, onboard new hires, complete documents without error, andmuch more. For more information, visit the Dropbox Sign website.