by
June 24, 2022
With multifaceted documentation in healthcare, see how an Intelligent document processing platform can help?
The healthcare industry has always operated on the brim of emergencies. While the industry has always proven its mantle with unprecedented events such as Covid-19, a core challenge like medical documentation is a major handicap for this industry.
To step through it, the industry is trying upon various technologies such as telehealth, AI based tech, management solutions, outsourcing services etc. However nothing comes close to intelligent document processing, if we talk about the YoY growth of different techs used in the healthcare industry.
To help you understand the dire need of automation via intelligent document processing in healthcare, we have written this article…
Human induced errors, urgency of data, data aggregation, etc. are some of the primary reasons why healthcare is switching to document automation.
While document processing is a core challenge in the healthcare industry, some primary objectives behind increasing interest in automated document processing can be summed up as-
Source:
https://www.rbccm.com/en/gib/healthcare/episode/the_healthcare_data_explosion
Healthcare is also generating more volume than any other industry. In 2020, the data generated by healthcare was 30% of the total world volume. Also, it is expected to reach 36% by 2025. The data encompasses different sectors of healthcare and digital healthcare devices.
In a 2021 report of GlobeNewswire, the market size of medical document management services was close to USD 536.63 million. This size is expected to grow with a CAGR of 12.5% between 2021-2028. Also another report by the same media house reports that the industry would grow to USD 1223.88 billion by 2028.
All these facts are clear indicators that the technology is being adopted at a rapid pace. It also displays the rising need of automation solutions for document processing that can do major heavy-lifting. With redundant and repetitive document processes, data automation can actually take the center stage and free up the employees for much more important tasks. Important tasks such as providing care and enhancing the patient experience in the premium segment.
Medical documentation generally includes tasks ranging from manual data entry to cross-referencing multiple documents. With this, healthcare organizations are often forced to have a separate department for document processing.
Some of the documents that are a frequently utilized are mentioned below:
However, there are plenty more documents used, each of these documents represent different facets of information. This information is likely to be fed manually into the EHR system. On the other hand, an IDP is the easiest way to automate the same workflow.
The increasing awareness of people around medical issues, and recent occurrences such as the pandemic, are now contributing in adding additional volumes of data and widening the scope of IDP adoption. This directly means an increasing need of healthcare institutions to keep dedicated employees to deal with documentation, or for maintaining numerous proof of records.
Other issues such as:
It is also a perfect replacement for any inferior document management infrastructure that is in use by the healthcare industry. It is a disruptive tech for the healthcare industry that can completely transform document processing and its management. Also, adopting an IDP platform can offer autonomy to the healthcare sector.
To deal with documentation, healthcare organizations normally rely on unintelligent medical document management softwares. Even though these softwares can help with sorting and standardizing the required documents, they are of no use when it comes to processing them for extracting useful data.
Adopting a smart, state of the art IDP platform can help the healthcare industry process, extract and classify important data at the speed of light.
A few short term benefits that can be seen post deployment of IDP in healthcare are:
A healthcare focused IDP can work with different formats, structures, and sources of data and can also offer easy integration with downstream applications including legacy infrastructure.
From the initial diagnosis reports to the medical prescriptions, and from discharge summaries to health insurance documents, an IDP solution can automate processing of any data point and any workflow.
Apart from being used by hospitals, it can be adopted by other subsidiaries in the medical industry such as medical insurers, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, etc.
To get you a better understanding, some of the most common use cases in the healthcare industry for IDP are mentioned in the next section.
There are multiple IDP use cases in healthcare. Some of the most common ones have been listed below:
Claims processing has proved to be an exhausting process. In a study by Demigos, around 91% of Americans had medical insurance coverage in 2020. This has now seen a tenfold increase and is hence a top reason for adopting IDP. Also at present, a majority of medical expenses are covered by health insurers. This leads to a long trail of claims settlement giving way to multiple human-prone errors.
IDP Solution: IDP with AI intelligence can focus on all key entries. It can extract data and verify it for different processes such as Claims Adjudication, Pre-authorization, Appeals, Grievance, Credentialing, etc. With IDP, the processing turnaround time can be exponentially reduced. The entire cycle’s routing time and efforts are also minimized. With AI intervention organizations can check the credibility of the seekers in bulk.
An IDP can check claims in coherence with state and federal regulations. Also, the AI model trains itself for rejected cases by effectively bucketing them and demanding feedback for them. It can also validate the data by cross-referencing the source of truth (such as government ID’s) provided for the uploaded document.
Medical coding is a frequent task utilized mostly by the medical insurance sector. It involves the translation of medical reports into shortcodes that help reduce the complexity while processing a medical report.
In a study conducted by Zippia, it was found that a total of 92,702 medical coders were working in the United States alone and the medical coding space was facing frequent human induced errors like upcoding, incorrect shortcode, telemedicine coding error, etc.
IDP Solution: Intelligent Document processing is a collaboration of multiple technologies jolted together. An IDP would utilize the embedded OCR to extract the data, and make use of NLP to understand the Shortcode. In fact, the user can define the short code key values used for data extraction while establishing a custom workflow. Combining this data, the bill can be easily processed in a fast paced manner.
A licensed physician or surgeon creates a Medical Examiner Report. It is the result of a series of tests conducted by practitioners.
Developed nations like the U.S.A track & record the medical histories of its citizens. MERs help medical practitioners to tackle the ailment & decide the best treatment. These documents add volumes to the Electronic Health Records which are crucial. The initiative is being taken so seriously considering the fact that despite spending exceptional amount of budget on healthcare, the country still exhibits the worst life expectancy amongst developed nations. The per capita spending by the US crossed $10,000 which is twice to some of its contemporaries such as Australia, France, Canada, etc. whereas the average life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years. On the other hand, the country mentioned exhibits life expectancy in the numbers such as Australia (82.6), France (82.6), and Canada (82.0).
This leads to endless record maintenance that is tedious and time-consuming. This takes away precious time from the practitioner's schedule for non-core activities.
IDP Solution: An IDP will auto-extract all the data from your system. It will then store it onto the enterprise’s ECM System. An ECM allows healthcare professionals to fetch a patient's health record anytime & anywhere.
Medical institutions today heavily practice digitization of health records. Even in developing nations digitization is being practiced overtly. Many countries are also upgrading their health policies based on the data collected. The issue is the cost and time incurred in data entry.
IDP Solution: An IDP can automatically collect health records from the documents uploaded on it. It can extract & verify data to store it in the final database.
A multi-specialty hospital with different departments like neurological, orthopedic, gynecology, etc. produces a lot of documents.
Each department has to manually process these volumes of documents. Basic entries like a patient's profile, current medical situation, consent forms etc. at every step creates new data.
IDP Solution: An IDP is a document processing platform with AI capabilities. The operator only needs to upload the data into the platform from there the platform will do all the heavy-lifting of data-extraction and verification.
In a report by Statista, there were 365 thousand registered clinical studies in early 2021. Clinical trials are conducted on a sample set of people. These are carried under normal conditions or controlled environments. The data during this process is collected meticulously and in turn helps researchers identify side effects of drugs & vaccines. Also, it helps them figure out plausible treatment.
With a sample set of hundreds and thousands of people, maintaining & managing validated data with no human error is tricky.
Beyond this, processes like metadata analysis, classification, filing process, etc. further delays release.
IDP Solution: An IDP automates the meta-analysis for trial documents. It categorically captures, collects, reads, and analyzes the trial’s data. Besides this, it processes and auto-classifies the information fed. This accelerates the filing process with validation. This consequently helps in minimizing the delays in clinical trials allowing healthcare companies to bring life-saving solutions faster.
We understand that the market is flooded with IDP solutions and choosing one can be a difficult task. While most of the IDP solutions can give AI powered, automated insights for proactive decision making, choosing VisionERA would give any the dire capability of customizing workflows on demand.
Loaded with an array of features like proprietary AI technology with zero third party dependence, end to end automation it can adapt and automate any healthcare workflow. Adding to it, VisionERA also handles rejected files like a pro with its enhanced bucketization techniques.
Enhanced with smart learning mechanisms and a recommendation engine for better sampling of feedback files, VisionERA has a lot more to offer to healthcare providers. It is a platform independent and cloud native solution helping hospitals easily create their own repository of data. Its smart insights board also helps the healthcare organization to determine the level of automation for each department.
Healthcare is at the frontline of services and adopting the IDP path can help this industry a great deal. From using it to extract useful medical data for saving patients' lives to making key business decisions from the data extracted, a smart IDP can help the healthcare industry with everything.
Note: Now getting VisionERA for your healthcare organization is just a step away. Our platform is being offered to our customers at just $0 invoice. Want to learn more about the terms and conditions of the offer, click on the link here.
Interested in checking out VisionERA by yourself? Simply use our free trial button to do it today.
Want to know more about how the healthcare industry can leverage IDP? Schedule a demo with our automation experts now.