Do you remember when you first heard the idea of a paperless office? I do and as a techguy I was enthralled by the idea. Of course, like all great ideas, reality hit me in the face when I realized that even as my healthcare organization went electronic, we still had a ton of paper we had to manage. In fact, in some ways, EHR software are paper creating machines and nothing is going to stop a patient from bringing in a paper copy or thousands of faxes coming into your office that need to be sorted and managed.
While the EHR has solved many problems (remember doctors’ handwriting?), healthcare still faces the ongoing challenge posed by paper and manual processes. This is what Stephanie Lahr, M.D., CHCIO, CIO and CMIO at Monument Health, and her team faced. Thousands of faxes were still being sorted manually which took up too much of her staff’s precious time. To address this problem she turned to Sudish Mogli, Chief Technology Officer at Healthcare Triangle, and his team to leverage their automation to save time and reduce the friction associated with these manual processes.
I sat down with Dr. Lahr and Mogli to learn more about this project at the ViVE 2022 conference. They shared the challenges they faced and how using OCR and NLP technology they were able to automate things like identifying which patient each fax was associated with and categorizing them into the right bucket (ie. referral, prescription, business, etc).
Dr. Lahr’s team still currently reviews the automation and approves them, but the automation already in place has saved their team significant time and has helped them to be more accurate. While the process is not fully autonomous yet, that is the long term goal. Unlike other projects which are static or even get worse over time, the automation technology from Healthcare Triangle continues to get better over time as it learns from its errors. Dr. Lahr believes that as accuracy improves, they’ll be able to fully automate the sorting of these faxes which will save even more of her team’s time.
In our interview, we also discussed how the staff feel about this kind of automation. At first, it wasn’t a surprise that some of these workers wondered if this type of automation would take their job from them. Dr. Lahr notes that this kind of vulnerability and fear is not uncommon in these positions. However, she commented that they’ve been able to help those people embrace the project as a way to make their jobs better. Given the hiring challenges of many healthcare organizations, these staff are often working the jobs of 3 people and so automation like this actually frees them up from the overwhelming burden they feel.
If you want to learn more about how Dr. Lahr and Healthcare Triangle are working to automate the manual processes at Monument Health, you’ll enjoy the following interview.
Learn more about Healthcare Triangle’s document automation solutions on the readable.ai page: https://bit.ly/360Nb4s
Learn more about Monument Health: https://monument.health/
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