AI is making contributions in many health care settings by creating doctors’ notes, but an equally urgent task in many organizations is processing, storing, and routing incoming documents such as referrals and prescription requests. Augusta Health, a community health system in central Virginia with a 255-bed hospital, four urgent care clinics, and many other sites, has to deal each year with 750,000 paper documents—a total of 2.4 million pages—submitted by scanning or fax.
In our recent interview, Leigh Williams, CIO at Augusta Health, and Audrey Brislin, Vice President of Product and Marketing at Forward Advantage, talk about the AI-based solution for document recognition and scanning from Forward Advantage that is relieving staff at Augusta Health of the tedious and error-prone job of redirecting the documents.
Augusta Health has had a relationship with Forward Advantage since 1999 and so it made sense to extend this relationship with Forward Advantage’s new document routing solution. Prior to implementing this new solution, Augusta Health would present each document to a human agent on a screen. The agent would determine what kind of document it was, where it should be stored, and which clinician should receive it for action. This was preferable to paper handling, but still delayed both treatment and billing. Williams said they needed “a really slick process.”
Luckily, Forward Advantage has recently added AI-driven categorizations that can potentially automate the entire process of identifying, storing, and routing documents. According to Brislin, the key is to understand the provider’s workflows. Some are more consistent than others, and automation should be applied to those that are consistent and predictable. One of the benefits of Forward Advantage is that it does leave room for a human in the loop.
Augusta Health has been deploying the AI automation for a few months and is finding it a great solution that fixes a “long-standing, intractable problem.” Success metrics they’re tracking include labor costs, and the time required to get documents to the clinicians to act on. Clinicians love getting the documents in their native MEDITECH workflow faster than when the documents were routed by a human. Williams expects the automation to help with staff retention, because categorizing documents by hand was so boring and unfulfilling, “no value add.”
Automation, along with centralizing the categorization process, allows Augusta Health to run analytics and derive insights such as where prescriptions and referrals are coming from. Williams summarizes their experience as a safe and high-impact deployment of AI. Brislin expects that in the future, AI will also route documents outside the organization and enable work with third parties.
Watch our interview with Leigh Williams from Augusta Health and Audrey Brislin from Forward Advantage to learn more about this AI solution which is solving real world healthcare challenges.
Learn more about Forward Advantage: https://www.forwardadvantage.com/
Learn more about Augusta Health: https://www.augustahealth.com/
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