Salesforce has released Intelligent Document Automation (IDA), technology for healthcare and life sciences companies to digitize their document management processes, which can help minimize administrative burdens, reduce potential costly errors, and improve the patient experience. Combined with Intelligent Form Reader powered by Amazon Textract–an Amazon Web Services (AWS) capability designed to extract printed text, handwriting, and structured data from documents using machine learning–customers can use IDA to help increase the efficiency and accuracy of their health document workflows, from processing patient referrals to patient services program enrollment all on one platform.
Healthcare continues to rely largely on legacy systems such as faxes and paper documents to manage patient records and communication such as enrolling patients in care programs, patient referrals and intake. With that comes a set of operational challenges, such as receiving documents across multiple channels and manually entering and re-entering information into disparate applications like PDF editors and electronic health records. This often makes it difficult to find the right document for the right patient when it is needed quickly. This can also make day-to-day business processes, such as enrolling patients in a care program, managing the patient referral and intake processes, or verifying prior patient authorizations, disjointed and time-consuming. When inefficiencies like these occur, they can lead to potential patient care risks, lost revenue and a frustrating experience for employees and patients.
Introducing Intelligent Document Automation for Health Cloud
IDA for Health Cloud helps provider, payer, pharmaceutical, and medical device organizations simplify how they process and manage their documents:
Unify the end-to-end document lifecycle on a single platform: Healthcare and life science organization personnel can receive, process and track all patient and plan member forms in one place, eliminating the need to toggle back and forth from multiple screens. For example, an intake coordinator at a home health agency can log into Health Cloud to pull a patient referral form from their queue, edit or remove any irrelevant or unnecessary pages, attach the document to the right patient record and confirm relevant patient data was automatically populated to the appropriate fields in Health Cloud. Later, not only can the intake coordinator reference the document but if any of the patient data extracted from the form or document is incorrect, the intake coordinator is also able to edit and update the field if needed.
Streamline document intake with intelligent routing: Intelligent Form Reader with Amazon Textract goes beyond optical character recognition (OCR) and uses machine learning to read incoming documents and help personnel to automatically route them to the right place. For example, payer organizations can set up routing for prior authorization requests–like drug prescriptions–that are faxed based on date, priority, or request type. By setting up routing of these prior authorizations, payer organizations are able to help expedite processing of these prescriptions for the patient.
Drive efficiency and accuracy with standardized checklists: Customers can apply a pre-configured checklist of items to be completed whenever they receive documents such as patient referrals or pre-authorization forms, to help ensure forms are processed consistently and accurately every time. For example, before enrolling a patient into a care program for a drug trial, a pharmaceutical company can help ensure that all relevant items like the patient’s consent and personal identification are collected, recorded and tracked.
Boost employee productivity by reducing manual data entry: Without the right technology, trying to complete document-heavy tasks can lead to costly errors and delay patient or member care. By leveraging OCR technology augmented with machine learning to accurately extract data–including tables, form elements and handwriting– and populate the text directly into fields in Health Cloud, healthcare and life sciences organizations can automate manual data entry and process documents faster. This improves the experience for personnel, patients and members.
With the new Health Cloud Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) capabilities, Salesforce is advancing its vision to help customers simplify patient care and engagement, work together more efficiently, and build 1-to-1 relationships across the entire health journey.