Electronic Document Management
Case Studies:
Health Alliance reduces cost, increases customer service
The Health Alliance, including the Christ, University, Jewish, St. Luke, and Fort Hamilton Hughes Hospitals, processes over 5,000 lab requisitions every day in the consolidated lab operation. Because of the sheer volume of paperwork, the Health Alliance needed an improved method of distributing, filing, and retrieval for lab requisitions. Each requisition needs to be routed to billing clerks for proper insurance and patient billing prior to filing. Additionally, customer service personnel need quick access to the original documents for resolving patient and insurance issues. Therefore, an RFP was issued for a project to manage these documents electronically through the cycle. Goals of the project were to reduce costs, improve customer service and market share, and eliminate inefficient paper-based billing processes. A 100% reduction for storage space for new requisitions was desired. Another important objective was to provide simultaneous access to the original requisitions by customer service, lab referral billing, sales, and marketing personnel.
DocuVision responded to this challenging situation with a combination of "best of breed" tools: Kofax Ascent Capture to provide a high-speed scanning interface, the Keyfile Document Management System for storage and retrieval of the requisitions from an easy-to-navigate interface, and Visual Basic scripting to interface the document management system to the legacy billing system on the hospital mainframe.
The process starts when Lab Requisitions are entered into the PathLab system which prints a bar-coded label with patient id and source location information. The label is attached to the requisitions which are then sent to scanning. Ascent Capture scans and automatically indexes the document by interpreting the information in the bar code. Images are then released into Keyfile, where they are routed electronically to all personnel involved in the billing process. Billing personnel now key from image, rather than from paper, and as they process each new requisition, the Patient ID is automatically entered into their legacy billing system through a unique "screen-scraping" technique. This reduces the number of keystrokes that the billers need to enter. Where two people were required to sort incoming requisitions prior to billing in the manual system, the software now provides for automatic sorting. Manual filing of 5,000 requisitions per day has been eliminated since the imaging application automatically files the documents in "electronic file cabinets".
Requisitions are now electronically available to customer service personnel to assist in problem resolution. Additionally, the external audits of the Lab Operations have shown a much-improved ability to find individual lab requisitions in a timely fashion.