It's Time for Healthcare to Embrace Digital Transformation

Digital transformation in healthcare continues to be a key topic in many healthcare leaders' minds. Healthcare providers of every size face the same challenge of improving patient care and engagement while managing costs. However, many obstacles create complications including limited staffing, outdated systems, payer contract complexities, and more. By embracing digital transformation, healthcare providers can begin to tackle these obstacles and accomplish their goals for the future.

Digital transformation in healthcare affects many aspects of the business from freeing up resources that can be devoted toward patient care and increasing patient engagement to improving operational and financial efficiencies. With AI, automation, and technological advancements, the healthcare industry stands to gain improved processes, quicker payments, and fewer claims denials.

 

Digital Transformation in Healthcare Starting with Automated Claims Processing

Claims management and processing is a major operation in need of digital transformation in healthcare. This is often a thorn in healthcare providers' sides because of its complexity. Claim denial rates are between 6% and 13%, which eats away revenue. 

These statistics highlight the importance of submitting clean claims right from the start. However, this is easier said than done especially when relying on manual processing and outdated systems. Many healthcare claims are being denied for simple reasons such as a spelling error, incorrect coding, missing patient identify information. Given that healthcare organizations' resources are stretched thin, it makes sense that claims processing would be vulnerable to human error.

Once again, digital transformation in healthcare can step in and smooth the process. Exela is a leading claims processing provider with a solution that enhances claim processing by unifying data from all incoming communication channels, performing pre-submission checks to create clean claims, and intelligently routing correspondence for optimal processing using automated decisioning. Exela’s Healthcare Claims Processing solution reduces denials and resubmissions by applying business rules to produce clean claims prior to submission. Using automation and artificial intelligence, Exela increases transaction processing rates and accuracy while reducing manual processing and rework.

 

Take Complex Claim Processing Further

According to a 2021 CAQH report, only 21% of medical administrative transactions are digital while the rest are paper. Exela leverages exclusive vendor contracts with leading health plans for complex paper claims processing.

Embrace digital transformation further with Exela's PCH Global solution, a powerful digital platform that not only provides a single point of access for claims management but provides a central bridge between all parties including the provider, payer, and patient. 

PCH Global promotes clean claim submissions by identifying certain-to-denied claims, thereby improving first-pass rates. Its iterative feedback loop technology helps the system continuously learn and improve to identify errors enabling proactive claims management with system flexibility as your contracts change. 

Finally, the system automatically tracks and records any addition, deletion, or modification to transactions along with user reference and timestamps providing clear audit trails and ensuring full compliance.

 

Digital Transformation of Remittance Payments

The 2021 CAQH report determines that the healthcare industry could save 48% of annual spending by transitioning to fully electronic transactions. Manual processing significantly slows down operations especially when human errors are taken into consideration. Automation streamlines this process reducing errors, posting payments quicker, and improving overall efficiency making it a terrific place for digital transformation in healthcare.

Exela's Medical Lockbox simplifies the healthcare payment process by digitizing and automating manual, paper processing tasks. Using a state-of-the-art scanning platform and intelligent OCR/data capture technology, Exela’s Medical Lockbox solution converts paper EOBs from any source into 835, electronic remittance files, payment reconciliation and posting to the healthcare organization's medical billing system. By streamlining the payment path, Exela’s Medical Lockbox solution reduces the time it takes for payments to post and allows quicker access to deposited funds. Submitting secondary claims or patient billing, depending on the patient’s coverage, makes the payment cycle faster from Primary, Secondary, Tertiary or Patient payments.

Not only does Exela's Medical Lockbox streamlines payment processing, but it also features a web-based denial management tool designed to increase the recovery rate on denied claims. This web-based management tool presents the original claim and all related remittance information in a single view simplifying the process for users to adjust the claim, bill the patient, or appeal the denial. Insights are gleaned through reimbursement metrics presented within Exela’s Medical Lockbox’s configurable reporting function. These insights are valuable with billing system audits and contracts negotiations.

 

Automated Contract Management

Healthcare payer contracts vary greatly, each having different policies, regulations, and parameters. The contracts of each insurance company are often revised and updated annually so healthcare organizations need to renegotiate several payer agreements every year.

Keeping track of the current contracts and any annual updates is an enormous task that burdens healthcare resources. Without a handle on contract management, healthcare organizations are vulnerable to underpayments which affect their bottom line. Contracts and underpayment management are yet another place where digital transformation in healthcare is needed.

Exela’s Revenue Integrity solution automates the contract management process, document scanning, indexing, profiling, loading and maintaining all third-party payer agreements. Agreement terms are tracked and providers are presented with notifications of important dates as well as amendments and updates. Instead of using limited resources to keep track of contracts, automation is ready to step in.

Exela’s Revenue Integrity solution also offers predictive contract modeling that provides accurate reimbursement calculations for current and future contractual agreements. By providing multiple scenarios and utilizing the most recent one-year patient data set, the platform presents the net dollar and percentage increase or decrease.

This solution also identifies retrospective, current and prospective underpayments from all contractually obligated third-party payers.

 

Summary

Digital transformation in healthcare opens many doors and it’s time providers embrace the opportunities available to them. AI and other technologies are ready to streamline antiquated processes, increasing efficiency and accuracy while freeing up personal time.