Case Study:
Wellstar
Customer
Wellstar Health System is one of the largest and most integrated healthcare organizations in Georgia, USA.
Industry
Healthcare
Overview
Being one of the largest hospital systems in Georgia, Wellstar deals with a lot of patient data and millions of documents like Consent Forms, Transfer Forms, EKGs, Lab Results, among others that need to be correctly linked to and stored in the Patient's Electronic Health Record. Manual management of such large volumes of information is not only time-consuming and discouraging, but also error-prone, insecure, and costly.
At a Glance
Wellstar turned to TEAM International to optimize and streamline its medical documentation workflow, still ensuring HIPAA compliance. We designed a multifaceted robotic process automation (RPA) solution to fully automate the process.
Outcomes
- 24k employees empowered;
- Over 90 percent accuracy reached in the first month;
- An easily scalable system in case of emergency;
- Optimized operations and high employee satisfaction;
- Accurate processes and excellent patient service;
- Better data security and regulatory compliance;
- Short implementation time to add new document types.
Processing millions of documents on a daily basis
Wellstar is a chain of health facilities in Georgia, USA. It's one of the largest networks, including 11 hospitals, 9 cancer centers, 55 rehabilitation centers, 15 urgent care locations, and more.
Most of the paperwork management activities associated with patient records were being handled manually every day. Such an approach posed challenges, including:
- Manual analyzing and assigning medical documents to the correct patient record was a tedious process, prone to errors that could result in patients obtaining inaccurate information and providers submitting incorrect claims that would be refused;
- Routine tasks kept medical staff busy and didn't allow focusing well on higher-value work, leading to overtimes and burnouts;
- With multiple document types and formatting issues, ensuring accurate results turned into a real challenge;
- High error rates associated with manual processing and categorizing medical records could lead to the organization's failure to comply with HIPAA rules and standards.
Choosing the right approach to healthcare automation
Initially, Texas Center for Lifestyle Medicine sought a working solution to free up its employees from performing multiple laborious and repetitive tasks, and thus focus on quality patient service. Additionally, the organization wanted to avoid under coding, increase revenue, and prevent claim rejections. TEAM International drew on its wealth of experience and expertise in the healthcare industry to build an RPA solution and fully automate the EHR audit and medical code validation processes. Consequently, Texas Center for Lifestyle Medicine was able to accomplish its objectives and realize a whole range of other benefits as well.
Creating an impact in the healthcare industry with RPA
TEAM International investigated current operations and built a cloud-based service, including several cognitive services, namely machine learning, natural language processing, and optical character recognition.
Using an API endpoint, it accesses, analyzes, and classifies medical documents. The system identifies the document type and retrieves the required information to link papers to patient records. Finally, an RPA bot can navigate through the electronic health record system indexing those documents to the corresponding patients. It's important to note that all these actions are performed in a HIPAA compliant way.
Cognitive automation adds value to day-to-day operations
With the successful deployment of the RPA solution, Wellstar Health System has reduced reliance on human employees regarding repetitive, ruled-based processes and so optimized its staff workload. Other outcomes include:
01
Over 90 percent improvement in accuracy
Automation has virtually eliminated human errors demonstrating over 90 percent accuracy level within the first month.
02
Seamless document management
The solution is capable of processing various document types within a single multi-patient file. It may be easily scaled to support parallel processing and increase system capacity if and when needed.
03
Lower turnaround time
With better medical document management efficiency, the turnaround time has significantly reduced. Consequently, less time and money spent on finding mistakes, and employees can focus more on patient care.
04
Better security and compliance
Since documents are processed by automation bots, and more accurately, the overall organizational security and regulatory compliance have surely improved.
05
Enhanced employee satisfaction
Document processing is now done effectively and effortlessly with the highest degree of accuracy and speed, eliminating the need for overtimes or headcount growth, resulting in happier employees.