The following is a guest article by Simran Bagga, AI Program Director and Chris Larkin, Chief Technology Officer at Concord Technologies.
A digitized document workflow that includes data extraction capabilities elevates the level of care a provider administers. Here’s how it works.
A fax isn’t just a fax. A facsimile, telefax, digital fax, cloud fax—however you describe your means of transmitting documents—represents much more than basic data. A fax document flowing between systems and healthcare entities is actually a patient on the move. The effectiveness of a provider’s ability to extract pertinent data, move the information, and transition that patient in care will largely impact the patient’s outcome.
While clinicians and digital fax providers occasionally get caught up in the intricacies of pre-authorizations, referrals, claims forms, and lab results among other documents, achieving speed, accuracy, and contextual understanding in their transfer is critical. A successful digital document exchange process that incorporates data extraction functionality enables both consistent and efficient transfer of patient health information and the supported decision-making required for optimal care provision.
Moving from analog to extraction on the digital fax journey
For providers still using analog fax communications, there’s substantial validation to securing a digitized document workflow. Various complications in both administrative and patient workflow typically motivate practices to bid farewell to manual exchange of paper-based documents. Patient information rekeyed from manual faxes into the EMR, scheduling software, or communications with other providers, offers numerous opportunities for errors. Clinicians, simply seeking to provide quality care while being efficient, bear the brunt of compromised data integrity. Transmitting data digitally is the first step toward improved accountability and workflow, followed closely by embedding these capabilities into a practice’s clinical and line of business applications.
The potential of data extraction is realized when the provider is able to leverage advanced capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and augmented intelligence—provided by humans—to identify and route the data efficiently, then leverage insights to understand the impact on patient outcomes and business goals.
Integrating data to generate provider-driven insights and improvements
Identifying and routing digital faxes to the appropriate recipient requires a deep analysis of the available metadata so the extracted data can be transformed into structured data, and ultimately be used within various clinical and administrative applications. For effective data extraction, it’s also important to understand what type of information is critical and to whom.
For example, all entities may require fields such as patient name and diagnostic code, but depending on the nature of the communication — think insurance verification vs. referral request — and the recipient — another provider vs. a payer — various pieces of data will be relevant: medical record number, account ID or case ID, provider NPI number, date of encounter, date of admission, or date of discharge, to name a few. Understanding the context and breadth of the fax communications’ data as it’s integrated into the provider’s workflow is a vital part of the data extraction process.
If a practice wants to gain retrospective insights regarding referrals’ management processes, for instance, data extraction on different providers and insurance affiliations is imperative. In a more timely application whereby a care partner inquires about bed availability, immediate data extraction is needed to respond quickly to the request. Later analysis of the data will provide insight about a facility’s efficiency in intaking patients and its loss rate of referrals, which can generate strategies for improvement including timeliness of response, expanded clinical capacity, and revised allocation of staff. Further process performance data insights relating to length of stay for particular patients who have been accepted (or diverted elsewhere) can be applied for additional strategic improvements.
The key tenet underlying all these data extraction applications of digital faxes is provider customization: based on a practice’s patient population, business plans, and workflow, the data pulled and routed must support the organization’s goals.
Liberating data to facilitate stronger care coordination
While document exchange in healthcare has always been tedious, various technological developments have transformed the cumbersome communications process into an opportunity to view patient encounters more holistically. Digital data exchange combined with data extraction has generated intelligent information usage for clinical, financial, and analytical purposes. “Just a fax” simply does not support the frictionless transfer of patients, nor does it further continuum-of-care best practices. Providers require the ability to make better decisions both on behalf of the patient and on behalf of their own ability to treat a given patient or diagnosis at a given time. Complete, quality data that’s presented with confidence at the right moment will enable efficient document processing and better patient outcomes overall.
About the Authors
Christopher Larkin, Chief Technology Officer at Concord Technologies, a leading provider of cloud-based fax and intelligent document automation software for healthcare providers and enterprises, is a seasoned healthcare executive with vast experience leading technology and cognitive systems innovation. Simran Bagga, Program Director, AI and Machine Learning at Concord Technologies, has dedicated her career to improving how data guides decision-making.
