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Improving document management

By Healthcare Finance Staff

Healthcare providers are not immune to the current economic conditions that affect most industries. Providers must accommodate dwindling profit margins by constantly managing costs, and as a result, physician practices are being forced to reexamine their processes in hopes of finding ways to do more with less.

This introspection has led CFOs, practice managers and other healthcare decision makers to increasingly turn to information technology to enhance efficiency and cut costs.

There are a range of IT products for every stage of the healthcare process, but some providers have discovered that their best opportunity to boost efficiency comes at the very beginning of the process. The integration of card scanning technology can help streamline front patient entry to EMR, billing and insurance claims for increased speed, accuracy and a better bottom line.

Insurance and drivers license card scanning technology with data capture involves a simple integration of a hardware/software combination, compatible with most major practice management systems.

Through optical character recognition, or OCR, an electronic scan is taken of the patient’s insurance card and driver license at each visit and the information is automatically populated into the practice management system.
This technology immediately impacts the patient experience, as a sick or injured person can forgo the task of filling out numerous forms, possibly repeating the same task completed during a previous visit.

Efficiency also benefits the front desk staff, as there is no need to photocopy patient information. The front desk team no longer needs to manually key in patient information – a process that averages around seven minutes per patient record.

Errors that result from manually keying data are tantamount to creating a mistake at the beginning of a long, complex math problem. What starts as a single inaccuracy creates a butterfly effect throughout the EMR, billing and the insurance claim process for an issue which, once recognized, will invariably require more time and resources to correct than today’s providers can afford.

Dana Mau, practice manager at TLC Pediatrics in Allen, Texas, has used insurance card scanning and OCR technologies for almost five years.

According to Mau, before insurance card scanning, rejected claims added 10 days to reimbursement, requiring time and staff resources to track down errors with the additional cost of resubmitting manually.

“In addition to the time to hunt down the error, fix it and print a new form, we lose several days waiting for postal delivery,” Mau says. “With electronic capture, resubmittals have been reduced drastically, so we’re saving money on that effort.”

“Since the majority of our submittals are clean claims, we are being paid more quickly and regularly,” Mau adds. “I’d say the average turnaround for payment is 10 business days from submittal and, best of all, we are currently experiencing a rejection rate of less than one percent.”

What this means for providers looking to combat the economic crunch is that a single IT solution has the potential to deliver far-reaching, measurable efficiency throughout the process – from a better patient experience and efficiency at the beginning, to a stronger bottom line for CFOs and practice managers.

Daniel Moulton, MD, is the president of Innovative Card Scanning.