Healthcare administration is a costly business. According to a study by Health Affairs, administrative costs make up roughly 25% of total hospital expenditures—or around $200 billion—in the US, and that number is increasing. What’s more disheartening is that the high administrative costs don’t correlate to better quality healthcare—meaning this money is more of an unnecessary waste than an investment in good healthcare. The American Medical Association (AMA) estimates that a majority of doctors still use paper to request insurance authorization for procedures and referrals, and 83% still use traditional fax machines to do so.
The problem with this, of course, is that those excess costs have to be absorbed somewhere, meaning either the patient or their health insurance company will ultimately end up with the bill. It would be fair to deduce that a significant part of this administrative problem is due to inefficiencies in the processes. But how do you combat inefficiency in such a heavily-regulated, highly complex field like healthcare?
One way to start is by streamlining document processes to reduce unnecessary manual work, such as pre-sorting documents before scanning and manually entering data into the content management system. Here are 5 ways PSIGEN’s document capture and data extraction solutions can help streamline these processes for a hospital, doctor’s office or other healthcare facility:
- Auto-import documents: PSIcapture’s auto-import function monitors hot folders for new documents and automatically imports them into the PSIcapture workflow, eliminating the need for setup prior to scanning.
- Automatically classify and extract data: Truly automate and streamline the capture processes with PSIcapture’s Classification module, featuring the cutting-edge Accelerated Classification Engine (ACE). ACE can access existing databases to automatically classify never-before-seen document types and perform data extraction. This saves hours of time that used to be required to configure a workflow.
- Standardize naming conventions and organization: Standardization is a key component of administrative efficiency. PSIcapture allows you to determine a document and file-naming system so that your captured documents will be easy to find once they are routed to the repository.
- Automatically process important forms, such as patient surveys: The Affordable Care Act requires many healthcare facilities to gather patient feedback in the form of surveys. This has created a burden on these facilities to process this information in a timely manner to comply with regulations and maintain their funding. PSIcapture’s processing tools, including Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) for reading check boxes and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) for recognizing handwritten text can greatly speed up the processing of these surveys and reduce the manual labor burden on administrative staff.
- Distributed indexing and validation: PSIGEN’s browser-based indexing product, PSICapture Fusion, can be used to simplify the process of validating various documents, such as pharmaceutical orders. Captured documents are routed from PSIcapture into a PSIfusion queue, where authorized personnel can access them, validate them and route them on to whatever EMR system or repository is used by the facility.
These are just a few of the ways PSIGEN can help healthcare facilities become more efficient and reduce administrative waste, allowing them to focus more on quality patient care and less on menial tasks. For more information on a PSIGEN healthcare solution, contact our sales team today.
