signNow provides a better patient experience and reclaims working hours for a Canadian IVF clinic

For Atlantic Assisted Reproductive Therapies (AART), a fertility clinic in Halifax, Canada, patient care is of the utmost importance. Going through fertility treatments is an emotional process, and the staff at AART aims to alleviate the friction. 

One way they’ve done that is by making it very easy for patients to sign the abundance of important paperwork that comes with reproductive therapies. 

AART uses signNow to send, collect, and organize patient paperwork and it’s made the administrative process seamless and efficient. 

We spoke with Julie Keizer, Chief Operation Officer, and Kayleigh Miles, Care Compliance Coordinator, to learn more.

A reduction in paperwork errors and in manual work 

AART uses Mellowood Medical as the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) company that supports their patient portal. A signNow partner, Mellowood introduced AART to the eSignature solution at just the right time. 

“The pandemic kind of forced us to go from physical paper consents to electronic consents. Now that we’ve moved to signNow and have our templates set up, it’s barely any work for us. We’ve saved at least a 0.5 full-time employee, which allows us to provide better patient care. That’s a key benefit for us.” 

— Julie Keizer, Chief Operation Officer

Patients are now sent their paperwork via email instead of having to physically visit the AART clinic to complete any necessary consents, which has made it easier for patients to access their forms and fill them out anywhere, versus having to find a printer, scan the documents, or drop them off. Using signNow has also removed a pretty significant consent-related risk from the fertility treatment process. 

“Patients are unable to start treatment until consent forms are signed, and signNow has solved that,” says Julie. “It’s eliminated the medical legal issue that we were facing to ensure we had paper copies of consents prior to treatment, so now we can rest assured that any consents are signed prior to treatment.”

Favorite signNow feature: Templates

Kayleigh is the main AART team member to oversee and implement signNow. She took advantage of signNow Academy to learn how to use signNow better and, specifically, how to set up templates. 

AART uses about 25 different templates which are sent and received directly through their patient portal.  In addition to being a great time saver, Kayleigh loves that signNow templates are able to be set up in a way that produces completely error-free documents.

“We have a question on one of our forms that asks ‘how many embryos are being transferred?’ and on our paper forms, patients could write in whatever number they wanted, which is not always realistic,” explains Kayleigh. “With our signNow templates, we’re able to provide specific answer choices only so that the documents are completed correctly from the start. It’s really nicely structured and it requires significantly less legwork on our end since we no longer have to chase people down.” 

Another great feature of signNow templates is that they can be set up to go to two different recipients. This is highly beneficial, as fertility treatments typically involve two people, and they may not always be in the same location at the same time. 

“I love that signNow is mobile-friendly, which is a huge plus for people trying to move things forward. If we have a couple where one person is traveling when they receive their documents, both people will be notified and can sign on the go, which removes any obstacles from keeping their process moving.” 

— Kayleigh Miles, Care Compliance Coordinator

For patients, this digital signing process just takes some of the headache out of a pretty intense process. It’s something they don’t really have to think about, which is such a nice perk. 

“We have repeat patients who were with us before we went digital, and they have expressed how much better it’s been to work with us since we implemented signNow,” says Julie. “We also send out monthly surveys to our patients and they all love the convenience and ease of going digital, particularly as it relates to communicating with our clinic. It’s been great.” 

signNow was a great choice for AART especially because it is GDPR, HFEA, and HIPAA compliant, which is highly important for a medical clinic. And it’s proven to be a significant time-saver, too.

AART used signNow powered by AWS.