Digitization of health records promises improvements in the delivery of personalized healthcare at lower costs. However, EHRs and smarter systems meant for providing physicians with decision support tools and simplifying data sharing between both providers and patients, have also brought forward several challenges. Physicians in particular have been burdened with responsibilities that take focus away from their patients. More time during patient encounters is being spent on EHRs and patient encounter documentation. This is not only putting pressure on the perceived quality of patient interaction and care but also results in physicians spending significant time off work on documentation. This burden has become a chief cause of physician burnout.

The key question decision-makers focus on while exploring solutions to ease physician burden is: how do we quantify and track the ROI from the digitization of health records and patient encounter documentation initiatives? Answering this question requires a deep understanding of where, and in what forms, these returns come from. Only with this understanding can one justify the investments.

The HITECH Act and Meaningful Use incentives have dramatically transformed the adoption rate of electronic health record (EHR) systems within healthcare organizations. These initiatives have successfully spurred widespread implementation of EHR technology, significantly enhancing healthcare operations and patient management.

To illustrate, by 2021, a remarkable 96% of non-federal acute care hospitals had integrated EHR systems into their operations. This represents a substantial leap from a mere 28% a decade prior. Such growth underscores the powerful influence these policies have wielded in driving technological advancement across the healthcare sector.

Key Impacts of the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use Incentives:

• Increased EHR Adoption: These incentives have made EHR systems nearly ubiquitous in hospitals, contributing to enhanced record-keeping and streamlined processes.

• Improved Healthcare Delivery: The transition to EHRs has paved the way for improved patient care coordination and more efficient sharing of medical information.

• Enhanced Data Management: By standardizing digital health records, these initiatives have facilitated better data management and analysis, leading to more informed clinical decisions.

Overall, the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use initiatives have played a pivotal role in modernizing healthcare infrastructure, making EHRs a cornerstone of contemporary patient care.

1. Practice Efficiency Gains

The most valuable commodity for a physician is TIME. EHRs and patient encounter documentation solutions provide physicians with the tools to streamline their processes and eliminate zero value-added activities. 

Recent research has shown that physicians are spending an average of 1.84 hours a day for completing documentation. A significant number of them have reported spending two hours or more completing documentation outside work hours daily.

Patient encounters are typically coded using SEVEN content categories:

1) medical

2) therapeutic

3) lifestyle

4) psychosocial

5) positive talk

6) emotional talk

7) partnership

Time spent during a patient encounter that does not get coded in these categories is essentially unproductive in nature and is adding to the physician's burden.This burden is highest when physicians use the EHR System interface for the documentation of patient encounters. Not only response times are known to be longer on these systems, but their point-and-click interface also requires extensive typing – and this combination very often consumes more than 1/3 of patient face-to-face time. This also increases the time spent on signposting (telling the patient what you are doing when you shift your attention to the computer) when using the EHR for reading the screen or keying in details with or without verbal or visual contact with the patient. This puts pressure on the number of patient visits handled by a physician per day, as well as the perceived quality of practice and patient care. As an example, a physician who sees 12 patients per day earning @$100/hour, spending 20 minutes with each patient and 10 minutes of self-documentation, is effectively spending upwards of $4,000 per month on self-documentation!  

Integrated desktop dictation solutions provide documentation without the need for typing by leveraging speech recognition and facilitating movement between patient encounter fields in the EHR system more efficiently using simple voice commands. However, they come with a steep learning curve, and the challenge of iterative error correction resulting from inaccuracies due to deficiencies in the lexicon – as a result doing precious little other than saving typing effort.

The use of ai medical scribe (live or remote scribes @$20/hour), or transcription services (dictation-based medical transcription @$3.0/minute) is known to alleviate the data entry burden placed on physicians to some extent. However, it also adds new cost components like the cost of using scribes/transcription services and the cost of physician time spent reviewing and approving submitted transcripts outside of work hours daily. There are also the challenges of time-intensive training and onboarding of scribes, managing high turnover rates (attrition), and avoiding the potential risk of backlogs on account of batch processing. Even when these risks are well managed by the physician, in the example of the physician mentioned above, these solution options would cost more than $3,000 per month on services hired and in terms of the physician’s own time a net cost saving $1,000 per month compared to self-documentation! 

Digital scribes (a.k.a. medical robots) employ advances in ambient listening (AL), speech recognition (SR), natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and internet of things (IOT) to provide physicians with tools to automatically document elements of the spoken/equipment-sensed clinical encounter. They provide documentation accuracy of 99% and above, with no necessity for voice profile training.  Physicians can now spend less patient visit time on the EHR and more time with their patients improving many aspects of the visit. Cloud-based digital scribe technology requires minimal training, costs significantly lesser than other solution options, and frees up precious physician time unlocking incremental earnings potential. In the example of the physician mentioned above employing digital scribes translates to enabling natural patient conversations coupled with cost savings in excess of $750 per month, and a possible unlocking of incremental earnings potential to the tune of $3,750 per month – a combined gain of $4,000 per month! 

Understanding the True Costs of Paper in Healthcare

Maintaining paper records in the healthcare sector comes with significant expenses that extend beyond mere dollars and cents. The reliance on paper records plays a substantial role in driving up the already high administrative costs associated with U.S. Healthcare, which, according to research, accounts for 15% to 30% of medical spending.

Financial Burden

The financial implications of managing paper documents are significant. Healthcare facilities spend considerable amounts on paper production, storage, and management. These costs add up quickly and can strain already tight budgets that could otherwise be allocated to enhancing patient care or upgrading technology.

Impact on Quality of Care

The hidden costs, however, might pose even greater challenges. Relying on both paper and electronic systems can create fragmented patient histories. This fragmentation can lead to gaps in patient information, affecting clinical decision-making and ultimately, the quality of care a patient receives. When healthcare providers lack complete and accurate information, it can result in delays, misdiagnoses, or medication errors.

Efficiency Challenges

Furthermore, paper records require additional manpower for organization and retrieval, which can slow down processes and increase human error. The inefficiency of paper can lead to extended wait times for patients and increased workload for staff, impacting overall operational efficiency.

In summary, the costs of maintaining paper in healthcare encompass financial burdens, potential risks to patient safety, and operational inefficiencies, highlighting the urgent need for a shift towards digital solutions.

How Does Intelligent Document Classification Improve Operational Efficiencies in Healthcare?

Intelligent Document Classification revolutionizes healthcare operations by automating numerous routine tasks. This transformation begins with streamlining document processing—from scanning and delivering images through workflows to exporting crucial data into clinical or business systems. Here's how it enhances efficiencies:

• Data Extraction Automation: By efficiently extracting the essential data from medical documents, this technology minimizes reliance on manual data entry, significantly reducing labor costs and room for human error.

• Reduced Exception Handling: With smarter processing, the need for manual intervention and error correction is greatly minimized, ensuring that staff spend less time on repetitive administrative tasks.

• Streamlined Document Preparation: This system speeds up the document preparation and scanning processes, removing the bottlenecks that often slow down workflows.

• Improved Consistency: By applying uniform standards and rules across various document types, the technology ensures consistency in document handling, which is critical for compliance and accuracy.

Operational efficiency is further boosted by enhancing healthcare workflows. For instance, faster classification translates to a reduced patient length of stay, as quicker processing of documents enhances the speed of medical service delivery. It also offers better visibility of patient information, thereby enabling more informed clinical decisions, ultimately improving patient outcomes.

Importantly, by cutting down the time spent on digitization and administrative duties, healthcare professionals can allocate their energies towards direct patient care. This shift not only elevates the patient experience but also enhances job satisfaction among healthcare staff.

What is Intelligent Capture and How Does it Automate Key Digitization Steps?

Intelligent Capture is a transformative solution that streamlines the digitization of documents by automating traditionally manual tasks. This technology leverages advanced algorithms to convert both paper-based and digital documents into useful, actionable data effectively.

Automating Document Capture and Processing

Intelligent Capture systems employ pattern-based recognition algorithms to understand and learn from a wide array of data. These systems capture, process, and transform documents while continuously enhancing their accuracy and performance through adaptive learning. This means less time spent on manual data entry and more focus on utilizing information strategically.

Simplified Indexing and Classification

One of the standout features of Intelligent Captur is its ability to automate the indexing process. By automatically filling key indexing fields, it effortlessly streamlines document management. This is complemented by intelligent document classification, which identifies and categorizes documents using optical character recognition (OCR) along with pattern-based logic. For example, medical documents are quickly classified by analyzing critical content such as keywords, semantics, and document layouts.

Handling Exceptions

While intelligent systems handle most tasks, there are instances where manual intervention is necessary. Documents that cannot be confidently classified are set aside for human review, ensuring no information is mishandled.

Efficiency and Speed

Intelligent Captur technologies can significantly speed up the document classification process. They can identify documents in mere seconds, vastly outperforming the traditional human processing time. This swift workflow not only boosts efficiency but also enhances accuracy and consistency, ultimately saving both time and resources.

In summary, Intelligent Captur automates critical steps in document digitization by improving data accuracy, speeding up processing times, and reducing the need for manual labor, all while ensuring high levels of efficiency.

What Are the Benefits of Intelligent Document Classification in Healthcare?

Implementing Intelligent Document Classification in healthcare offers a myriad of advantages that can significantly enhance both efficiency and patient care. Here’s a breakdown of the primary benefits:

Automation of Document Handling: By automating steps such as scanning, image delivery through workflow systems, and data exportation to clinical or business platforms, healthcare organizations streamline their processes.

Data Extraction Efficiency: Advanced systems extract essential data from medical documents swiftly, accelerating the entire document management lifecycle.

Reduction in Errors and Manual Corrections: Intelligent classification minimizes the need for manual intervention for exceptions and corrections. This reduction not only speeds up processes but also cuts down on potential errors.

Time Savings in Preparation and Scanning: Automation removes labor-intensive tasks associated with document preparation and scanning, freeing up staff resources for more patient-focused activities.

Cost Reduction: By eliminating human error entry points and reducing labor costs tied to manual processing, healthcare facilities can operate more budget-efficiently.

Standardization and Consistency: It ensures that there are uniform standards and rules across various document types, consolidating the management of medical records.

Beyond these processing benefits, the operational efficiency gained is tremendous. Efficient classification can reduce patient length of stay by improving access to necessary information quickly. This also enhances decision-making capabilities by providing clear and immediate visibility into patient data, subsequently leading to better clinical outcomes.

Ultimately, one of the most critical advantages is allowing healthcare professionals to focus more directly on patient care. By spending less time on record digitization, staff members can devote more attention to activities that influence the patient experience directly and positively.

2. Minimum Disruption To Patient Experience

Patient experience is an integral component of healthcare quality, and it includes several aspects of healthcare delivery that patients value highly when they seek and receive care. Meaningful information sharing between patient and physician, and active engagement of patient and physician in healthcare delivery play a pivotal role in shaping over all patient experience.

Self-documentation using EHR Systems bring the challenges of long response times, excessive data entry, inability to navigate the system quickly, fear of missing something, and notes geared towards billing – all of which cause interference with the patient-clinician relationship, and negatively impact the patient experience.

Accurate and dependable medical transcriptions using dictation software and/or medical scribes are expensive, time-consuming, and disruptive to the patient experience. The time lag between the patient visit and the note transcription is also a major downside. Therefore, physicians still have to complete some of the traditional documentation duties such as ordering medications, lab work, and/or imaging to ensure that patients were treated in a timely manner and this disrupts patient focus and impacts patient experience.

Digital scribes on the other hand deliver value beyond delivering practice efficiencies. They collect data from physician-patient interaction accurately and in real-time, helping with analytics-driven decision-making, including even automating some of these decisions as processes mature. They can also process clinical encounters involving multiple languages while supporting linguistic variations, styles, accents, visit types, and unique medical jargon use and this makes them the most physician and patient-friendly solution to consider.

3. AI-Driven Diagnosis & Treatment Recommendations

With digital archives and electronic health records, there is no lack of raw data. AI-based digital scribes are the ONLY solution that can provide the necessary foundation to help physicians to be aware of the best practice experiences of other doctors in group practice and the lessons learned from all such doctor-patient interactions captured in electronic health records. AI can also share the expertise and performance of specialists to supplement providers who might otherwise not have access to such expertise. Real-time decision support capabilities of these systems can surface multiple treatment options to develop a personalized and contextualized plan of care. More modern solutions are even leveraging population health machine learning models to predict populations at risk. 

Recomended Reading : 6 Practical Tips To Make Medical Scribing work

4. Medico-Legal Compliance

Accurate medical records constitute the first line of legal defense for physicians and they may be referred to in legal proceedings to understand the diagnosis, treatment, and progress of a patient, or they may be used to prove malpractice on the part of a health care provider. Given EHR’s value as a legal document, capturing accurate information in real time is of paramount importance. The toughest part of patient encounter documentation is ensuring unfamiliar medical terminology is accurately captured as an integral part of medical records. Once again HIPAA-certified AI-based digital scribes score superior in surfacing exceptions for physicians to address in real-time on account of the electronic interfaces they support to facilitate interoperability between various healthcare systems.

5. Low/No Switching Costs

Switching costs are the expenses that business incurs when they change solutions and/or providers. Unlike traditional dictation and transcription solutions, AI-based digital scribes leverage cloud technologies to provide subscription-based, no-learning curve solutions, to improve physician efficiency and patient care effectively bringing the barriers to trying and switching down to JUST A DECISION. 

6. Scalability

What maximizes the return on investment of patient encounter documentation solutions is their scalability. By going digital, healthcare executives and managers can grow their efficiencies and compliance advantages even as their business grows, without having to spend an arm-and-a-leg on overhead and infrastructure upgrades. 

When it comes to choosing solutions for the digitization of health records and patient encounter documentation, it pays to take a comprehensive view of how these SIX sources of ROI impact your business.  Don't trade short-term convenience for long-term consequences.

Hospitals persist in using paper despite the widespread implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) technology for several compelling reasons:

System Compatibility Issues

One significant hurdle is the lack of compatibility between various document management systems. This is particularly problematic when a hospital's technology doesn't effectively communicate with external facilities, forcing them to rely on paper as the most viable solution.

Paper-Dependent Workflows

Many healthcare processes are still entrenched in paper-based procedures. For example, documents such as patient check-in forms, consent forms, and records needing signatures haven't fully transitioned to digital formats, maintaining their reliance on handwritten documentation.

Prescription and Pharmacy Documentation

Pharmacy records and prescription processes continue to be predominantly paper-based. This persistence is often due to historical practices and regulatory requirements that have yet to transition fully to digital systems.

Fax Usage for Record Sharing

The healthcare sector, especially parts that haven't adopted cross-enterprise document sharing methods like XDS, still heavily relies on fax machines. This reliance stems from the necessity to exchange records with providers outside a hospital's immediate network, where electronic sharing options may not be feasible.

These challenges underscore the complexity of transitioning to a fully digital system in the healthcare industry, illustrating why paper remains a staple in hospitals.

Streamlining Healthcare Indexing with Intelligent Capture

In the fast-paced world of healthcare, efficient document management is crucial. Intelligent Capture and extraction technologies serve as powerful tools to simplify the indexing process, transforming how medical records are managed.

What is Intelligent Data Capture?

These solutions are designed to automate and enhance the often cumbersome digitization tasks in healthcare. By using advanced pattern recognition algorithms, they process all types of documents—be it paper or digital—into actionable data. This transformation not only boosts productivity but also enhances the accuracy of the information retrieved.

How Does It Improve Indexing?

Automatic Population of Key Fields: Through Intelligent Capture, key indexing fields are populated automatically, reducing the error-prone and time-consuming nature of manual entry.

Accelerated Document Classification: Utilizing optical character recognition (OCR) and sophisticated pattern-based logic, these systems quickly identify and categorize various document types. For instance, medical documents are classified based on keywords, semantics, and layout, leading to faster and more reliable data retrieval.

Improved Accuracy & Consistency: What would normally take a human around 40 seconds to identify can be accomplished by intelligent systems in just five seconds. This speed not only saves time but enhances the consistency of the indexing process, critical for maintaining high standards in patient care and data management.

Handling Exceptions: When documents cannot be automatically classified, they're flagged for human review. This ensures that no critical information is misfiled or lost, while still capitalizing on technological efficiencies.

Benefits of Technology in Healthcare

By leveraging these sophisticated systems, healthcare providers can significantly improve their document management processes. The results? Reduced operational costs, minimized manual errors, and ultimately, more time for healthcare professionals to focus on what truly matters—patient care.

To learn how you can maximize the ROI of your firm, reach out to support@s10.ai.