ForComputerized Management Services, a medical management company that focuses onmeeting the needs of radiologists, technology paves the path to a profitablefuture.
“Becausewe’ve never lost a customer and have extremely low employee turnover as well asstrong long-term relationships with all of our key suppliers, we have the meansto invest in the technology necessary to build a world-class infrastructure tomeet the future needs of our clients,” says President Tom Brajkovich.
Thisforward-thinking approach led the company to implement Laserfiche enterprisecontent management back in 2006. “There’s a lot of miscellaneous paperassociated with medical billing, a lot of non-standardized communicationscoming from patients, payers and providers,” Brajkovich explains. “We knew thatdigitizing the paper and automating associated processes would make us moreefficient.”
Priorto implementing ECM, ComputerizedManagement Services housed its paper archives in bankers boxes at offsitestorage lockers, making it difficult for staff to find older documents. Filesthat had yet to be reviewed for coding and billing purposes were kept in filingcabinets, creating bottlenecks when documents were misplaced and limiting themanagement team’s visibility into the company’s overall workflow.
Tofacilitate access and improve productivity, the company now uses Laserfiche toprocess, manage and store four main document types:
- Reports and face sheets from providers.
- Explanation of benefits forms (both paper and electronic) from payers.
- Credentialing documents from providers.
- Internal training documents.
“We’reconstantly scanning, uploading and processing information,” Brajkovich says.
Documentsare processed and stored using Laserfiche Quick Fields 8, a high-volumecapture and processing tool, and Laserfiche Workflow 8, a business processmanagement tool. These tools eliminate the need for manual data entry andfiling by:
- Automatically extracting metadata from documents.
- Auto-populating index fields.
- Creating new folders.
- Auto-filing documents.
Fora company that receives thousands of documents a day from more than 100locations in California and Arizona, this automation results in a bigproductivity boost. It also makes it easy for employees to retrieve documentsby conducting simple field and text searches.
Processing EOBs with Enterprise Content Management
Furtherenhancing productivity, Computerized Management Services uses Laserfiche tomanage the explanation of benefits (EOB) forms that most insurers still send inpaper format.
“Weuse Quick Fields to convert paper EOBs into usable data, and Workflow tofacilitate EOB processing,” explains Denise Van, Vice President of Operations.
Viadocument shortcuts, the company uses Workflow to route EOBs to the appropriateclient teams for processing. Client team personnel work with dual screens, sothey’re able to view a document on one screen while performing data entry intothe company’s CPU billing software on theother.
AlthoughCPU and Laserfiche aren’t yet integrated, the Laserfiche Entry ID for eachdocument is logged in each patient’s record in CPU so that it is easilyretrievable. After the EOBs have been processed, Workflow removes the EOBshortcuts from the client team folders. Workflow then archives the EOBs by dateof service.
Workflow Automation AcceleratesCoding
ComputerizedManagement Services also uses Laserfiche in conjunction with A-Life, its computer-assisted coding system.
Whenthe company receives new information from a client site, it imports it intoLaserfiche using either Laserfiche Import Agent,which captures electronic faxes, or LaserficheSnapshot, which converts electronic documents into TIFF images.Documents are then processed by Quick Fields and exported to A-Life. Oncedocuments have been coded in A-Life, Workflow archives the documents.
Thebiggest benefits of Laserfiche, however, are felt when the company can’t useA-Life. “If a facility changes the format of its reports or face sheets, ittakes time to reprogram A-Life,” says Brajkovich. “When that happens, Laserfichetakes over.”
Accordingto Van, employees need a mere 24 hours to complete the coding process inA-Life. When done on paper, the process takes 5-10 days. When used as thecompany’s “coding back up,” Laserfiche enables staff to complete the coding processin 48-72 hours.
“Laserfichehelps us solve problems,” says Van. “If we had to code on paper every time afacility changed its format, we’d lose a lot of time.”
Thecoding process in Laserfiche works as follows:
- Documents are imported into Laserfiche using Import Agent or Snapshot.
- Documents are processed by Quick Fields, metadata is applied and Workflow moves document shortcuts to the Coder folder for processing.
- The coding manager assigns work and Workflow moves the folder to the assigned coder.
- The assigned coder codes the document using the preview pane in Laserfiche, adding coding metadata to the Laserfiche template.
- Workflow then moves the document to the billing team, which exports it to CPU for processing.
- Once the completion criteria have been met, Workflow archives the documents.
“Workflowis a wonderful tool,” says Van. “We rely heavily on it.”
The Key to Going Digital
Brajkovichand Van stress that Computerized Management Services’ success with Laserficheis the result of a phased approach to implementation and training. They firstworked with Laserfiche reseller JPI Data Resource to configure the system totheir specifications, and then they trained their staff.
“Wedidn’t roll out everything at once,” says Brajkovich. “Implementing the capabilitiesof Laserfiche slowly allowed us to make sure that adjusting to the new systemdidn’t slow us down.”
Initially,staff learned how to use Laserfiche to search and retrieve digital documents.Once the company rolled out Workflow, Brajkovich and Van took atrain-the-trainer approach, working with key staff from the data processing andclient teams to ensure that they were comfortable with the system and able toshow their team members how to perform their various tasks.
Today,as always, the company is in the process of improving its workflows.“Continuous improvement is important to us,” says Brajkovich. “In order toensure that we offer truly exceptional service to clients in the heavilynuanced field of radiology, we constantly look for ways to fine tune ourprocesses and our use of technology.”
No comments:
Post a Comment