It’s easy to let negative thoughts take over during such a strange and scary time. As we navigate our way through the COVID-19 pandemic staying positive is not as easy as it used to be. Nations are quarantined. People are sick. Essential workers are tired. If you’re feeling negative don’t worry, because you are not alone. Here are a few ways our human resources professionals advise us to try to stay positive and get us through this pandemic:
Lean on Your Support System: whether it is friends and family, coworkers, a therapist or an online community, reach out to those who support you. Everyone is in the same boat right now so finding people experiencing the same feelings as you is not difficult. Those that support you can help talk you through these negative emotions and help you develop healthy and positive coping mechanisms.
Have Gratitude: Being thankful is an easy way to pull yourself out of a downward spiral. Take a minute each day to write down what you are most grateful for. This will help you reflect on your blessings and inspire positive thoughts.
Help Others: Helping others is an easy way to instantly feel better. Whether you are sewing masks at home, delivering groceries for an at-risk relative or checking in via FaceTime on your friends, helping out will boost your serotonin levels and increase your positive outlook.
Create Something: Creative expression is known to boost not only your mood, but also your confidence. Start cooking, painting, writing or whatever it is that makes you happy. I mean why not? We’ve all got a little extra time on our hands.
Even though this is a scary and unprecedented time, we can all try to be a bit more positive. Positivity is contagious, so rather than spreading negativity around, let’s all do our part to make positivity go viral.
As of April 2, 2020, COVID-19 has infected 956,588 people and killed 48,320[1]. Hoping to contain the spread, the World Health Organization declared a “pandemic,” leading myriad companies to institute remote work. Many companies were unprepared. Even those with existing remote infrastructure were not necessarily ready for a scenario in which literally no one is in the office.
Nevertheless, Exela remains optimistic this great remote-work experiment will succeed. That’s because solutions ensuring business continuity even with no one in the office already exist. In fact, they’re integral to Exela’s Smart Office suite of solutions, which many of our customers had already been using prior to the pandemic. Smart Office automates a variety of office processes, enhancing efficiency, productivity, and security and setting the scene for seamless remote work. Exela’s Smart Office is comprised of a selection of data-driven solutions--some front-office, some back-office, all of which are aimed at creating and supporting a more efficient, productive, and sustainable workplace. These include, among others:
Digital Mailroom, which transforms paper mail into digital format, securely routing it to its intended recipient(s) anywhere with an internet connection.
PrintShop, which prints and copies documents remotely on-demand and securely routes them to their intended recipients.
Intelligent Lobby, which eliminates the need for staffed reception spaces and allows office access without unnecessary, and risky, interaction.
Over the next several days and weeks to come, we will be addressing these and other Exela Smart Office solutions and how they can help your office retain business continuity in these uncertain times. As you work through the current global crisis, please be aware that the best remedy currently known for COVID-19 is prevention. Here are the CDC’s best practices for prevention. And please do not hesitate to contact us at covidresponse@exelatech.com, and let us know if we can assist you in any way.
"Don’t fall for claims about remedies that will immunize or cure you of the disease,” warns the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Instead, practice prevention. Here is exactly what the CDC advises you to do in that regard: [1]
Avoid close contact
Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
Put distance between yourself and other people if COVID-19 is spreading in your community. This is especially important for older adults, cancer survivors, and people with other serious chronic conditions.
Avoid crowded locations like malls, theaters, and sports venues.
Keep your hands clean
Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds especially after you have been in a public place, or after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
If soap and water are not readily available, use a hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol. Cover all surfaces of your hands and rub them together until they feel dry.
Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands.
Avoid touching high-touch surfaces in public places—elevator buttons, door handles, handrails, handshaking with people, etc. Use a tissue or your sleeve to cover your hand or finger if you must touch something
We know that all of you are also preoccupied with this pandemic. As you work through this situation, please do not hesitate to contact us at covidresponse@exelatech.com and let us know if we can assist you in any way.
If you’ve been reading the Exela Blog lately, you probably already recognize how fundamental information management is to solving healthcare’s costly inefficiencies. As we discuss in the 7 Layers of Digital Transformation, properly leveraging information management is akin to properly pouring the foundation when building a skyscraper. But just as identifying, sourcing, and accumulating all your building materials is a necessary first step before you can pour your foundation, data aggregation is a prerequisite for data management.
Data aggregation often involves some level of data digitization.
Depending on where you’re at along your digital transformation journey, data aggregation may rely heavily on the digitization of paper documentation. One of the most reliable methods is via scanner. It’s for that reason Exela offers scanning solutions, tailored to the precise needs of our customers, wherever they are on the digital transformation journey. In some cases, our customers go so far as to engage us to take over their scanning workflow altogether for a completely streamlined end-to-end solution. That’s precisely what we did for a global pharmaceutical company, with the end result being not only better control, more efficient document management, and more streamlined adherence to applicable privacy rules and regulations, but also a vast reduction in how much the company relied on paper documentation.
The mailroom is a logical place to start, or accelerate, data aggregation.
Scanning is an important part of our Digital Mailroom solutions. As with scanning, we’re sometimes engaged to take over entire front-end mail operations in order to enable our customers to shift or maintain their focus on their core, revenue-generating work. Such was the case with a leading insurance payer, which came to Exela when its outdated mail facilities and processes were beginning to have a measurable negative impact on revenues. Exela’s solution was to relocate, reorganize, and re-equip the company’s mail operations, and the results were dramatic, resulting in vastly improved service levels alongside a 30% cost reduction per year. In some cases, we provide digital mailroom services in conjunction with other mailroom management services.
For healthcare payers, claims ingestion is another logical entry-point
Similarly, omni-channel claims ingestion offers a logical point of entry for data into the payer workflow. A common and significant payer pain-point involves the volume and variety of forms in which provider and patient claims enter their workflow. Our claims processing and adjudication solutions unify data from all incoming communication channels and perform pre-submission checks to create clean claims and intelligently route claims for optimal processing. For example, for a large healthcare claims processing center, our OpenBox platform streamlined the claims-intake process by automating the sorting and routing of inbound claims based on artificial intelligence technologies that were trained to identify, sort, and route claims according to form as well as content.
Medical coding doesn’t have to be a burden
HIPAA established the coding scenario that has proven a burden to many industry players, but the intention was streamlining operations. Streamlining operations is the goal of Exela’s coding services. Offered throughLexiCode, an Exela brand devoted to providing innovative health information management solutions that drive reimbursement, such services are designed to improve coding quality and minimize compliance risk, can be performed for you or alongside you in a variety of settings, for both payers and providers. Such services can be provided remotely, as they were for one of our large medical center customers. can also train your staff to code accurately and in compliance with HIPAA and other applicable regulations.
What comes next?
With health information management underway, there is a perfect opportunity to turn information contained in EHRs into strategic planning, billing and collections, marketing, and communications assets. Our data analytics solutions include, among others:
In our next post, we’ll be exploring how we take health information management to the next level via automation. Can’t wait? Check out the full story in our Q4 Edition of PluggedIN: Tell Us Where It Hurts: How Tech Can Heal Healthcare.
Major pharmaceutical supply-chain and logistics provider partners with Exela to integrate legacy platforms and improve data management.
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Features & Benefits
CHALLENGE:
Large pharmaceutical enablement company that works with numerous drug manufacturers to administer specialty drug programs began to feel the strain of their outdated technology capabilities. Specifically, unintegrated technology platforms and disparate legacy systems were creating challenges associated with a growing quantity of unstructured data and complex reimbursement claims documentation. The company was confronting unsustainable time and resource requirements related to ingesting, classifying, and adjudicating these materials.
SOLUTION:
What began as a request to solve a discrete need quickly grew to include complete, end-to-end support for the specialty drug lifecycle. Through Exela’s PCH platform and tech stack, all backend services were integrated, which enabled a shared data ecosystem and a smoother processing cycle across enrollment, claims processing and adjudication, billing and payments, and benefits verification.
Omni-channel data ingestion (email, fax, web, EDI, mail)
Connected ERP’s, 3rd parties, and legacy systems
Streamlined the entire product lifecycle
BENEFITS:
Exela’s solution provided a digital transformation across the entire specialty drug lifecycle, from enrollments to payments, which improved operations on several key metrics.
Reduced processing times
Improved accuracy of submitted claims
Enhanced user experience
Seamless connectivity between patients, providers, and payers
