Healthcare organizations and governments around the globe face an urgent, unprecedented need to improve healthcare quality and cut costs at the same time. Healthcare premiums rose 114% between 1999 and 2007, while wages increased only 27% in the same period. Such rapid growth in costs impacts overall economic health: It is estimated that a 10% increase in the cost of healthcare results in about 120,800 fewer jobs and $28 billion in lost revenues.
A major part of the problem is that healthcare remains a paper-intensive industry, with nearly 90% of patient-related and claims information still being paper-based. healthcare providers must contend with a wide variety of documents from the moment a patient enters a facility. Insurance and identification cards are recorded at the front desk. Patient charts are accessed, marked and filed. Doctors give written prescriptions. Diagnostic results are recorded. Lab requests are made, or specialists consulted. Test results are returned. Claim forms are issued to insurers and Explanations of Benefits (EOBs) are sent back. Payments are received. In fact, a survey in The New England Journal of Medicine found that 31% of every dollar spent on healthcare is spent on administrative costs. However, in the US, only about 8% of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use automated electronic patient records.
Inception Technologies document capture, document management and workflow solutions, such as Kofax Capture or PSIGEN PSIcapture, help healthcare organizations drive down costs by automating business processes. Patient care, customer service and profitability all benefit when document-intensive processes are transformed into efficient digital processes that integrate paper and electronic records into health information systems (HIS) in a secure and auditable manner, automate the processing of complex claim forms such as CMS-1500 and improve remittance processing.