What Is Smart Intake? How Docusign and Microsoft Are Transforming the Care Delivery Experience for Patients.

Why does manual patient intake still fail healthcare providers? 

A patient’s first impression shouldn’t be a clipboard and a 15-minute wait time. 

Yet for many patients, whether visiting a high-volume city clinic or a remote rural site, a manual intake process is not only frustrating but also a real barrier to care. And that’s just the beginning.

Today’s U.S. healthcare system faces multiple challenges that impact patient experience, clinical outcomes, and organizational viability. The population is aging and demanding more complex, higher levels of care. At the same time, trained clinical staff levels are declining, particularly in less populated areas of the country. According to HRSA, as of December 2, 2025, approximately two-thirds (63.1%) of designated primary care healthcare professional shortage areas (HPSAs) in the U.S. are in rural regions opens in a new tab.

The cracks in the system are showing.

• 31 days—up 19% since 2022 and 48% since 2004

  The average wait time for a physician appointment—across six medical specialties in the 15 large metro areas surveyed.

This data tells a clear story. The age-old, paper-driven approach to patient intake doesn’t scale. And that includes hybrid approaches that require printing, faxing, scanning, mailing, and filling out the same forms with the same info over and over. It’s a system prone to errors that increases staff burnout and locks patient data away in filing cabinets and PDFs. 

Why do these challenges persist? Too often, organizations get stuck in a “good enough” mindset, accepting inefficiencies as inevitable rather than seeking a better way.

But today’s healthcare organizations have a unique opportunity. Advancements in connected technology are empowering a shrinking pool of clinicians to effectively treat an aging population that needs higher levels of care.

What makes a good patient intake experience?

There are three critical requirements for delivering an outstanding patient experience:

1. Engagement: Build trust and loyalty from the first patient interaction with seamless, intuitive patient experiences.

2. Efficiency: Free care teams to focus on what’s most important—spending time with patients and delivering critical care—by eliminating tedious manual processes.

3. Effectiveness: Prioritize security and transparency—exceeding expectations, building trust, and setting a new standard for excellence.

Achieving these outcomes requires more than just good intentions. It takes the right tools and technology to turn vision into action.

How does Docusign IAM improve intake before and after the signature? 

Docusign can help you meet patients where they are, on any device, to ensure that physical location or lack of a printer are never a barrier to completing critical health documentation.

Traditionally, when organizations think of Docusign, they think of eSignature—the moment a patient signs their consents and authorizations. The Docusign IAM platform handles the entire agreement lifecycle, including everything that happens before and after the signature.

Before the signature, the IAM platform solves for “data malaise.” Instead of re-entering their name multiple times, the patient benefits from a streamlined, mobile-friendly experience in which data is entered once and auto-populated throughout the packet. 

Patient identity is verified in real time with Identify, which uses biometric verification from trusted ecosystem partners like CLEAR or knowledge-based authentication, minimizing fraud and ensuring that the person signing is who they say they are before the process even begins.

Dynamic routing to additional forms—tailored to a patient’s specific intake journey through Workflow Builder—enables sophisticated, customized intake sessions. For example, if the entered data indicates the patient may benefit from financial assistance, the workflow automatically directs them to the appropriate application forms.

Post-signature, IAM takes over the heavy lifting of coordination. Instead of requiring a staff member to scan a paper form or manually download a PDF and upload it into a folder, the signed, encrypted documents are automatically routed and saved directly into the system of record via API integrations and our ecosystem of 1,100+ integrations in the App Center. 

By connecting all the stages of patient intake, IAM turns a fragmented, manual process into a smart, automated workflow. 

This is how healthcare organizations move from simply signing a document to managing an agreement, and it’s exactly why Docusign’s integrations with key industry players like Microsoft are so critical to the partner ecosystem.

How Docusign and Microsoft work together to optimize patient intake

Before my current role as an enterprise account executive at Docusign, I was an industry advisor for the Health and Life Sciences division of Microsoft. I worked with providers, payers, and digital health organizations to modernize care delivery through cloud technology and AI, reducing friction across the patient journey, improving outcomes, and enabling more personalized, connected experiences.

And before joining Microsoft—and before shifting my focus to healthcare technologies—I treated patients full-time in the clinic as a physical therapist.

I felt clinical burnout firsthand while in practice. Much of that was due to the charting and documentation requirements. Because data accuracy impacts patient care, the first upstream touch points must be accurate, timely, and consistent throughout the patient's lifecycle. If we have platforms and tools that maintain consistent throughput at that entry point, they’ll enable the downstream tools that automate care workflow deliveries to be better for the clinician and the patient.

To enable this fully connected, streamlined experience, Docusign and Microsoft provide identity verification and management, audit trails, enterprise-grade security, and HIPAA compliance support. This deep integration ensures that smart intake is seamless while helping organizations achieve greater ROI from their existing tech investments.

Market signals are saying we need patient experiences to be hyper-personalized, immediate and transparent. The entry point into healthcare, which we call the “digital front door,” is about meeting patients wherever they are—on the device and in the environment that best suits them. And manual intake creates friction, especially in underserved areas. Microsoft connects data and the engagement across channels, while Docusign IAM digitizes intake and consent, allowing patients to complete everything ahead of time. This partnership enables borderless, connected care from the first touchpoint.

How does smart intake support HIPAA and CMS compliance?

Smart intake supports compliance by capturing structured, auditable data at the point of entry. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized rule CMS-0053-F opens in a new tab, which establishes standardized electronic transactions for healthcare claims attachments and supporting clinical documentation, with compliance required by May 26, 2028. Docusign provides identity verification and audit trails; Microsoft Azure provides HIPAA-compliant infrastructure and identity management.

Additionally, both Docusign and Microsoft are prominent pledgees of CMS’s "Kill the Clipboard" initiative opens in a new tab, which promotes the use of digital tools and patient-facing applications to streamline information sharing and reduce reliance on paper-based processes. Meanwhile, the National Committee of Quality Assurance (NCQA) mandates HEDIS (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) requirements.

CMS is driving digitization beyond fax removal. HEDIS reporting today relies on manual chart abstraction and unstructured data. Docusign digitizes and structures documentation at capture, while Microsoft integrates and activates that data. Digital Quality Measurement opens in a new tab enables near-real-time quality reporting and care gap closure, shifting from retrospective reporting to proactive management and resulting in better patient care.

What’s next for smart intake?

Smart intake is an important piece of the healthcare optimization journey, but the synergy between Docusign IAM and Microsoft extends beyond the front door. The future is exciting for this partnership, which is redefining value across the entire care continuum.

Two years ago, we were still trying to overcome the status quo of manual documentation through the patient journey. Looking ahead, I see smart intake becoming invisible—just a subconscious activity that happens as patients integrate into and engage with their healthcare delivery. 

Patients will complete forms that are pre-filled and verified seamlessly. Providers will receive a complete set of integrated data right up front, empowering them to make informed clinical decisions without spending precious time on administrative paperwork. 

With Microsoft and Docusign working together, intake evolves into intelligent, personalized access to care that works across all communities and breaks down the barriers that previously existed.

To learn more about how this exciting partnership is transforming patient intake, watch our “Happy Patients Start with Smart Intake” session.