Setting Up a Check-In Kiosk

A kiosk is a tablet in your waiting room that lets patients check themselves in and out. It cuts queueing at the front desk and captures insurance and payment without anyone at reception retyping it.

It is also a logged-in device left unattended in a public room, so the first thing to get right is the lock.

Order the hardware

Devices are ordered through OfficePro. In device administration, New Device Order asks for an Order Type: and records who it was Ordered By: against your Practice: and Customer ID:.

The list then shows each Device and Type with its Status / Action - Pending while it is being prepared, Active once it is in service, Owned where you bought it outright - along with Start Date, End Date, Monthly cost and any Commitment. Disable takes a device out of service.

You can use your own tablet. The mounting hardware (a BouncePad or similar) matters more than people expect: a tablet that can be picked up will be picked up.

Lock the kiosk

This is the part not to skip. A kiosk sits logged in, showing patient names to whoever is in the room. The authenticator lock is what stops someone browsing your records while reception is busy.

• Lock Kiosk puts the device into kiosk mode. It then shows Kiosk access is locked. and does nothing but check patients in and out.
• Unlocking asks for an Authenticator Code from a staff phone - the same kind of code as multi-factor authentication.
• When enrolling the device, keep the Manual entry key: somewhere safe off the device. It is how you add a second person's phone later, and how you recover if the first phone is lost.
• Re-enable Authenticator restarts enrolment if it has to be set up again.

Enrol at least two staff phones. A kiosk that only one person can unlock is a kiosk that is locked whenever that person is off.

Card readers, if you use them

NFC patient cards let someone check in by tapping a card instead of typing their name. The reader needs a small local helper: from the NFC Card Reader add-on, use Download NFC Bridge Installer and run Install.bat on that machine.

The NFC Bridge runs locally on the machine with the reader attached, so it has to be installed on each one - it is not a practice-wide setting.

Before you put it in the waiting room

• Check the lock works, from a locked state, with a phone that is not yours.
• Check a second staff phone can also unlock it.
• Run one real check-in and one real check-out end to end.
• Put it where staff can see it. A kiosk out of sight is a kiosk nobody helps a confused patient with.