Informed Financial Consent (IFC) has long been part of hospital administration, but the way health services capture, manage and retain that consent is evolving.
Recent changes to Medicare’s Assignment of Benefit (AoB) process have brought renewed attention to patient financial workflows. While the reforms relate specifically to simplified billing, they highlight a broader issue for hospitals: how to give patients clear financial information, reliably capture their decisions and maintain an auditable digital record.
For many health services, the challenge isn’t introducing informed financial consent – it’s modernising the processes that sit around it.
The challenge with manual financial consent
Patient election and financial consent processes are well established across Australian hospitals. However, in many organisations, parts of the workflow remain highly manual.
A patient may complete a paper form at the bedside. Staff then need to collect it, check it, enter information into another system and scan the document into the clinical record. Finance, patient administration and clinical teams may each interact with the information at different points.
Individually, these are relatively simple tasks. At scale, they can create significant administration, duplicate data entry and gaps in the audit trail.
Increasing expectations around documentation and record keeping make these inefficiencies more important. Hospitals need to be able to demonstrate what information was provided to a patient, what election they made, when consent was captured and where that information has been recorded.
This creates an opportunity to look beyond compliance and consider how IFC can become part of a more connected digital workflow.
Digitising the workflow, not just the form
Replacing a paper IFC form with an electronic version is only one part of the equation.
The greater opportunity is to connect financial consent with the digital processes patients and staff already use.
Many hospitals are investing in patient portals, digital pre-admission, online forms, appointment communications and digital check-in. Financial consent can become another step within that experience rather than a separate administrative process that needs to be managed independently.
For example, a patient could receive and complete the required financial information before arriving at hospital. If it remains outstanding, staff could send the form digitally or assist the patient to complete it when they arrive.
Once completed, the consent can form part of a workflow that ensures the appropriate record is retained and relevant information is available to other hospital systems.
What could a connected IFC process look like?
As health services explore this area, the focus is increasingly on the complete workflow rather than the form itself.
Some of the practical capabilities hospitals are considering include:
- Enabling patients to complete financial consent before they arrive
- Allowing staff to send outstanding forms directly to a patient or assist them on a tablet
- Supporting staff-assisted completion where appropriate
- Incorporating consent status into check-in and other patient workflows
- Automatically generating and storing a completed PDF within the clinical record
- Passing patient election information into the PAS, eMR and billing systems
- Providing visibility of completed and outstanding forms
- Reporting on patient elections, including public and private election rates.
Connecting these steps reduces the need for staff to chase paperwork or enter the same information into multiple systems. Just as importantly, it creates a clearer record of what occurred throughout the consent process.
Making financial consent part of the patient experience
IFC is most commonly associated with elective inpatient and private patient processes, but the underlying principles extend further: patients should receive the right information, understand their options and have their decision captured appropriately.
The technology supporting that process should fit naturally into existing patient and administrative workflows.
Rather than treating IFC, Patient Election and Assignment of Benefit as separate compliance activities, health services have an opportunity to bring them into the broader digital patient experience.
A more connected approach can make the process simpler for patients, reduce unnecessary administration for staff and give hospitals greater confidence that the information they need has been captured, retained and made available to the systems and teams that rely on it.
The recent Assignment of Benefit changes are another reason to examine these processes. But the bigger opportunity is not simply meeting a new requirement. It is creating a more efficient, transparent and auditable approach to managing the patient financial journey.
