The movement to Kill the Clipboard: What it means for patients, providers, and the future of care
Healthcare leader and emergency physician Dr. Sean Kelly shares his perspective on the national push to eliminate friction and build a more connected, patient-first healthcare system.
Too often, patients are asked to repeatedly provide the same information: name, date of birth, insurance details, medical history. This information is required when checking into every appointment at every facility. And while it sounds easy on paper, that frequently isn’t the case in practice. What should be a simple process becomes frustrating and time-consuming, creating delays for providers and unnecessary administrative burden for healthcare organizations. Worse, it introduces opportunities for error that can directly impact patient safety.
That’s why Imprivata has pledged its support for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) “Kill the Clipboard” initiative, part of the broader CMS Health Technology Ecosystem. This initiative aims to eliminate outdated, manual processes and replace them with secure, interoperable digital access, putting patients back at the center of care.
What does “Kill the Clipboard” mean?
Killing the clipboard is about more than removing paper forms from waiting rooms. It’s about fundamentally rethinking how patient information is accessed, shared, and trusted across the healthcare system.
The CMS Kill the Clipboard initiative promotes a future in which patients can securely retrieve and share their health records through CMS-aligned networks or personal health record applications without having to repeatedly recall or re-enter the same information. It supports a healthcare ecosystem where data flows accurately, securely, and seamlessly across care settings, reducing friction for patients and providers alike.
For the U.S. healthcare system, this means fewer administrative bottlenecks, less clinician burnout, and more time focused on delivering quality patient care.
The link between physical clipboards and patient misidentification
In addition to being time-consuming and error-prone, manual data collection also poses risks. Patient misidentification remains a persistent challenge for healthcare organizations, and documenting everything by hand on a clipboard and paper plays a more significant role than many realize. When patients are misidentified, there are several ripple effects, such as:
- Medical errors due to incomplete or incorrect records
- Duplicate medical records are created, fragmenting data from the patient’s history
- Denied insurance claims and billing issues, leading to lost revenue
- Patient trust, safety, and experience are compromised
Repeatedly asking a patient to self-report information increases the chance of mistakes. Ensuring patient safety, reducing the need for cumbersome manual processes, and officially “killing the clipboard” are crucial to streamlining and advancing positive patient identification.
Imprivata’s commitment to optimizing healthcare and “killing the clipboard”
By supporting this initiative, Imprivata is reinforcing a long-standing belief: access to health information should be simple, secure, and frictionless for both patients and providers.
Imprivata has committed to empowering patients to retrieve their health records seamlessly, enabling secure data exchange, and reducing the need for repetitive, unreliable manual processes, one encounter at a time. As a CMS “Friend of the Ecosystem” and supporter of the CMS Interoperability Framework, Imprivata is working alongside industry leaders to deliver real-time, privacy-first access to health information.
How Imprivata Patient Access makes streamlined patient care possible
For years, Imprivata has been dedicated to using technology to effectively improve patient safety. Imprivata Patient Access helps healthcare organizations turn the vision behind this initiative into reality by enabling secure, identity-based access across digital healthcare interactions. By verifying patient identity at enrollment and accurately authenticating patients at every point of care with trusted biometric identity verification processes like facial recognition, Patient Access addresses key challenges by:
- Eliminating repetitive identification steps
- Reducing duplicate medical records
- Minimizing fraud and identity-related errors
- Streamlining registration and patient check-in workflows
Instead of relying on clipboards and manual verification, healthcare organizations can establish a trusted digital identity that follows the patients securely and seamlessly throughout their care journey.
Steps to reduce patient misidentification
To address these challenges and fully realize the promise of killing the clipboard, healthcare organizations should follow these steps:
- Make patient identification a leadership priority, not limited to revenue-cycle teams
- Adopt a robust, modern, and reliable patient identification solution
- Evaluate and optimize existing registration and check-in processes
- Share and scale success across all points of care in the healthcare system
By addressing patient identity at its foundation, healthcare organizations can reduce risk, improve outcomes, and deliver the patient-centered experience CMS envisions.
Learn more about how to enhance patient safety with Imprivata Patient Access.