How Electronic Signatures in Healthcare Transform Key Processes: GlaxoSmithKline’s Story
By Leor Melamedov
Healthcare providers are saddled with a number of challenges surrounding paperwork. On the one hand, they need to keep tight records and stay compliant, necessitating ample documentation. On the other hand, they are working with multiple parties, including patients who naturally have little time, patience, or even strength to deal with long forms and physical signatures.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the world’s biggest and most well-reputed pharmaceutical companies, struggled with that exact problem in the area of patient consent.
The GSK story
Employee motivation and product credibility is vital to GSK’s mission, since its people are what make the company tick. That’s why GSK gathers and shares patient stories with GSK’s internal professionals to show how their work is transforming patients' lives. Their contact center is uniquely positioned to gather these patient testimonials, as it’s usually the customers’ first point of interaction with the company.
Publicizing these stories is key for GSK — so much that there is a whole contact center division responsible just for collecting patient testimonials for each product. However, each collected testimonial requires document sign consent from the patient in order to be legally used for marketing purposes. And chasing these patients for signatures is not an easy task.
Fortunately, electronic signatures in healthcare make it simple to collect signatures online and in the moment, which will be discussed further along.
The challenge of efficiently gathering patient consent
GSK’s contact center was overwhelmed with chasing patients for consent. After the testimonials were in, the back and forth with patients turned out to be time-consuming and costly — unnecessarily prolonging turnaround times, which, in turn affected completion rates. Even the best patient testimonial was unusable without that final consent.
That’s when GSK started searching for a digital solution that would allow them to collect the needed forms and signatures quickly and easily.
The company wanted to make it possible for patients to instantly complete and sign consent forms without the need to wait for an email, and then print, fill out, and scan the consent forms.
Electronic signature software cuts turnaround time
GSK finally found Lightico’s instant document sign solution, which allowed their agents to collect consent signatures in real time while on a call. This eliminates the possibility of patients forgoing their signature simply because they forgot or the request form got lost in their inbox.
Lightico had GSK’s new consent process up and running in a matter of days, so the pharmaceutical company could immediately start collecting patient forms and signatures in real-time from the patient’s cell phone during the initial call. Patients no longer have to search for a fax machine, wait for emails, print and sign forms, and scan and send them back.
Instead, they receive the consent form by text message which they can simply finger sign from their cell phones in seconds while speaking on the phone with the GSK representative — immediately after their testimonial has been recorded.
The consent document is then shared with the patient and stored on GSK’s back-end system with a legally binding audit trail, in full compliance. No further post-call work is required by either the agent or the patient.
See how it works in this interactive demo:
8 minutes to document sign
Lightico’s electronic signature software solution is so effortless for both patients and agents that GSK can now collect patient consent in an average of eight minutes. Implementation also significantly increased completion rates, meaning that almost all collected testimonials can be shared with the entire organization.
GSK is now able to share more Voice of the Customer testimonials with the entire organization so internal professionals can feel the positive impact that they make on patient’s lives.
This kind of digital transformation is a drastic improvement to both the department’s productivity and the company’s credibility, which can now be replicated across other departments within GSK.
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