Context
In a practice, a patient’s arrival sets off a small chain of tasks. The receptionist identifies them, checks their appointment and opens their record, then someone decides which exams to run and adds them. The check-in kiosks on the market handle the start of this chain and stop at the door of the clinical record: adding the exam is still done by hand.
Operational Challenge
- A bottleneck at reception: Each check-in takes up about 85 seconds of the receptionist’s time. Five patients arriving together means a queue several minutes long.
- Information re-entered by hand: The type of consultation is almost always the one planned at the previous visit. So it is already in the record, but someone still has to look it up and enter it by hand.
- Duplicate records: A patient who is not found correctly gets created again, and their history ends up split.
- The language barrier: A patient who does not speak the practice’s language needs someone to help them.
Solution Architecture
The patient check-in kiosk recognizes the patient by their appointment time and initials, completed by their year or date of birth: no card, no code, no SMS. It finds the appointment in the practice’s calendars, then the patient’s record, which it creates if it does not exist yet. It works out the type of consultation from the last follow-up and adds the exam itself, with the right practitioner. By the time the patient sits down, their exam is already on the worklist.
A screen in the waiting room shows a QR code that opens the same journey on the patient’s phone. The code changes every day and can only be read by scanning the practice’s screen: being able to scan it proves you are on site, with no account or login. The kiosk also lets patients book a new appointment, report an emergency or request a document, in six languages. The whole system is installed on the practice’s own infrastructure.
Once checked in, patients see on their phone how late their doctor is running and when they are expected to be seen, updated every minute from the actual queue in the patient record. It is an estimate, not a guaranteed time, but it reassures patients: they know where things stand with their doctor.
Safeguards and human validation:
- If the kiosk is not sure who the patient is, it sends them to the front desk and adds nothing to the record.
- A patient who has already checked in is not checked in a second time: the kiosk shows them their scheduled exams.
- A patient who arrives more than 15 minutes late is sent to the front desk, and no exam is added.
- The data stays on the practice’s premises.
Measurable Impact
- Check-in goes from about 85 to 30 seconds for the patient, and from 85 seconds to zero for the front desk (field estimates).
- Several patients checking in at the same time, at the kiosk or on their phone, instead of waiting their turn at the desk.
- The exam already on the worklist when the patient arrives, with no need to enter the consultation type again.
- Patients who check in on their own, whatever their language.
- Reassured patients, who know how late their doctor is running for their appointment.
Next Step
See the kiosk in action in the demo. If an arrival in your organization should trigger a task in another tool, contact us to talk it over.