Health Information Management: How to Start
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 Such was the case with a leading insurance payer, which came to Exela when its outdated mail facilities and processes were beginning to have a measurable negative impact on revenues.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 through LexiCode, 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:
- Predictive Analytics
- Data Visualization Tools
- Liquidity Management
- Security and Compliance Monitoring
- Omni-Channel Communications
- Hyper-Targeted Marketing
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.
