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Patient care always involves documentation and filing of patient data, medical records, billing information and maintaining compliance with regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in large amount. It is ideal to keep a few crucial things in mind to operate efficiently and to make your client document collection way more quick and impressive. Here are some best practices to follow:

1. Standardize Document Types
   Establish a standard for identifying and collecting various types of documents, such as patient medical records, lab reports, insurance claims, consent forms, and billing information.
2. Authorization and Validation
   The next step is monitoring your data collection process. Make sure that you have rightly collected and secured all required patient data, including patient consent and authorization forms. More importantly, while handling such sensitive client data files, ensure complying with HIPAA regulations and other privacy laws. Develop and enforce policies and procedures that comply with these regulations.

   Perform data validation checks to ensure accuracy and completeness of the collected patient data, during the registration process.

3. Data Security
   Privacy and safety is important while handling sensitive patient health information (PHI). Use encryption, access controls, and stringent authentication methods to safeguard sensitive data.
4. Document Indexing and Metadata
   To maintain the collected documents with ease of access, implement comprehensive document indexing and metadata tagging.  With this, you can not only organize documents efficiently, but make retrieval and review easier.
5. Go Digital and Automate!
   Paper based documentation is obviously time-consuming and tiresome. To get rid of these traditional paper-based record keeping system, switch to electronic health record (EHR) system. EHRs streamline the process and enhance data accessibility.

Today, healthcare organizations find document collection software a reliable solution for streamlining all their tiresome, error-prone tasks of medical record documentation. You may consider using any secure patient document collection portals, online forms or mobile apps to gather information and documents online. You can find all the above-mentioned features in a single portal, saving you considerable amount of time with their automation features. It can even facilitate patient appointment reminders and follow-up communications, as needed.

Trending vendors like DocuTick, Allscripts and McKesson offer client-specific document collection solutions meeting the industry specific standards. Utilizing their services, you can easily save your time, as well as, efficiently streamline all your patient data collection activities.