Mapping Markets
January 22, 2025

Patient Intake Market Map: Reducing Friction, Improving Flow

Patrick Wingo's headshot
Patrick Wingo
Head of Research, Elion

This is part of Elions weekly market map series where we break down critical vendor categories and the key players in them. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.

Patient intake seems simple enough: Update personal info, provide insurance details, and let staff know the patient has arrived. However, this seemingly simple process often frustrates both patients and providers alike. Patients find themselves having to arrive early or rush to complete paper forms with repetitive information, while provider staff have to decipher handwriting and manage delays caused by form-filling.

Patient intake solutions enable healthcare providers to collect patient information like personal details, medical history, current health concerns, insurance information, and consent before a visit. These tools often include features like automated messaging to distribute intake forms, online form submission, and digital check-in interfaces. Many integrate directly with electronic health records (EHRs), ensuring that data is available to providers in real time.

The Push for Digital Intake

Regulatory changes supporting digital EHI access and interoperability provided the first push toward digital patient intake tools, and the trend continued to gain momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic. As waiting rooms became potential hotspots for virus transmission, healthcare providers turned to contactless workflows, including online forms and digital check-ins.

How Digital Patient Intake Tools Work

Modern digital intake solutions offer a mix of features designed to simplify the intake process:

  • Automated messaging: Patients receive reminders via text or email with links to complete forms online.

  • Online forms and submission: Patients fill out personal, medical, and insurance information from home, reducing time spent at check-in. Form-filling features may include digital upload of the patient’s insurance card, ID verification, and automated form-filling from an ID.

  • EHR integration: Collected data flows directly into the patient’s medical record, expediting pre-visit review and post-visit billing or follow-up tasks.

  • Digital check-in: Some vendors also offer on-site check-in kiosks or mobile interfaces allowing patients to confirm attendance, update forms, or submit payment.

Differentiation in Patient Intake

In most cases, patient intake is one step in a workflow that may include other processes, such as scheduling and appointment management. However, a few vendors have differentiated themselves by offering a true platform solution for a wider range of patient-facing administrative workflows, including marketing outreach, appointment followup, and billing. Examples include:

  • Phreesia, Clearwave, IntakeQ: End-to-end solutions for patient intake, insurance verification, appointment management, and patient billing.

  • Luma: Offers EHR compatibility and functionality across a range of use cases, from appointment management to intake and billing to population health outreach.

  • Notable: Broad AI platform with agentic capabilities and pre-defined libraries to help collect patient info for organizations that want to orchestrate their own care flows with a lot of composability.

  • Tellescope: Highly API-centric and composable CRM platform that can also do patient intake, heavily focused on digital health companies.

Another interesting trend emerging in this space is the growth of AI-enabled virtual triage and symptom assessment products as part of the patient intake process. For example:

  • CyrenCare is a patient intake tool focused on the ED use case, where encounter prioritization is critical.

  • SOAP Health and FirstHx are AI-powered medical interviewers that collect patient history and medical data prior to the visit, summarizing it into clinical notes to be integrated into the EHR. SOAP Health also identifies potential issues like cancer and heart disease.

  • Fabric is an AI symptom checker that does patient intake, triage, and routing processes, and like other solutions here, helps generate clinical notes.

  • Clearstep offers an agentic chatbot approach to help routing across care journeys from triage through scheduling, intake, and post-appointment follow-ups.

Where Patient Intake is Headed

Patients increasingly expect a more integrated and automated healthcare ecosystem, while minimizing provider documentation time remains a clear priority for many healthcare organizations. As AI capabilities advance and early AI vendors expand to become platform solutions across an ever broader range of use cases, we’ll likely see tools that integrate digital front door tasks like intake within clinical, billing, and care plan management processes.