As a onsite wellness professional, it’s easy to assume the most important part of every wellness event is the services you provide.

What’s equally important, however, is the participant consent forms. From a business and client relationship perspective, consent forms are one of the most important parts of any wellness event.

That’s why you won’t be paid until all of the consent forms from your event are safely returned to our corporate office in Omaha. We’re serious about our paperwork, and here’s why.

HIPAA and Privacy Concerns

Consent forms that are left unattended can be a huge privacy concern. Depending on the type of event, that paperwork can house some very sensitive information. HIPAA helps to protect that information by providing guidelines on how to handle that data.

The longer that you have the consent forms in your possession, the longer it’s at risk of being lost or stolen, which means our participants' sensitive health information is also at risk. Taking care of paperwork properly ensures participant privacy, all the while diminishing the potential for any privacy breaches.

Reporting Concerns

Unfortunately, our leadership team can’t be at each and every event. The consent forms you send us from those events are the most steady record we have of what happened there. The only participants that can exist to us are the ones for which we have proper paperwork.

Taking care of the details helps us to ensure that each and every participant is accounted for. This allows us to provide an accurate aggregate report to our client, as well as to ensure individuals receive credit for participating. 

Billing Concerns

Along the same lines, we bill our clients based on participation, which is counted by consent forms. See the connection there? Without consent forms, we’ll not only have inaccurate reporting, but we run into inaccurate billing and payment for services as well. Impeccable paperwork allows us to bill our clients for exactly what they agreed to—nothing less, nothing more.

So how do we take care of paperwork properly?

Well, here at the corporate office in Omaha, we respect our paperwork by operating on a “minimum necessary” basis. That means the fewest amount of people possible have access to as little paperwork as possible in order to get their jobs done. We enforce that by keeping our paperwork in a locked room that only certain employees have access to.

We want to extend this high level of respect to all of you who work our events. When it comes to paperwork, try to remember these things:

• Make sure consent forms are filled out correctly and clearly to ensure an accurate service record
• Take care of consent forms physically by keeping them covered or out of eyesight at events
• Send consent forms back to us as soon as you can after every TotalWellness event you work

Focusing on these three steps will help us provide secure and accurate events for all of our participants. It’ll also help keep you out of the doghouse by reducing the potential for silly mistakes.

Ultimately, paperwork is one of the most important aspects of your wellness event. It not only contains participant health information, but is used for recording and billing of all of our events. We’re serious about our paperwork, and we ask that you adopt that attitude too.

What questions do you have about handling wellness event paperwork?