Healthcare is all about taking care of people. Yet, 70% of physicians spend 10 or more hours a week on administrative tasks and 32% of them spend 20 hours or more.
With patient loads increasing, the demands on healthcare providers are greater than ever and burnout is common. In addition, 83% of healthcare facilities experience problems because they don’t receive enough patient information.
Fortunately, today’s technology can make a difference—a big one. Intelligent document processing (IDP) is a form of automation that can significantly change how information is pulled from healthcare documents and consolidated into a single repository that is easily accessed by any healthcare provider who needs it.
How Intelligent Document Processing Works
IDP uses artificial intelligence (AI) to take unstructured data and turn it into usable data. Unstructured data is any data that is not presented in nice, neat rows and columns. Instead, it may be the handwritten notes of a physician, a radiological image, lab results, or a signed consent form.
The IDP software can be trained to capture different types of data, regardless of its format, with the ultimate goal of full data integration. IDP can:
- Capture documents via scanning software
- Process images using computer vision algorithms
- Read text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Interpret the meaning of text using Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Classify information contained within documents
- Extract required data and information
- Validate data to ensure it is accurate and authentic
- Integrate data from different sources and between systems
IDP Use Cases in Healthcare
The use of IDP in healthcare is broad-ranging. It can help with data access, the sharing of information, and the overall improvement of patient care. Here are some examples of how IDP can make a difference.
Reading handwritten notes
Despite all the technology we have at our fingertips, healthcare providers still make handwritten notes while on the go. These notes can contain vital patient information. If a patient is seeing multiple healthcare providers, access to these notes can be a valuable aid in their diagnosis and treatment.
IDP can be programmed to read handwritten notes, turning them into readable digital text that can easily be shared between healthcare providers, whether or not they are in the same facility. The end result is that patient care can be improved because healthcare providers can access their colleagues’ on-the-go thoughts without having to be in the same physical location.
Patient onboarding
There is a lot of information that must be captured during the patient onboarding process. Patient forms, patient medical history, previous test results, and information on existing medical conditions must all be captured.
IDP can be used to capture all of this data, digitize it and integrate it into one centralized location, such as a core Hospital Information System (HIS), so it can be easily and quickly accessed by anyone who needs to refer to it. And once in a digital format, this data can be shared between healthcare providers, improving the flow of information.
Help speed diagnosis
It is common for patients to present with symptoms that are difficult to explain. Sometimes these patients undergo testing for conditions that are not relevant. And sometimes, their individual symptoms are not recognized as significant.
IDP can help avoid this by scanning a patient’s medical history and identifying symptoms that, when taken in combination, can help healthcare providers pinpoint health conditions that the patient is at high risk for or may already have. This makes it possible to run the right tests to make an accurate diagnosis.
How Does the IDP Implementation Process Work?
The goal of IDP is to make data processing easier and faster and to provide access to unstructured data. While the overall process of developing IDP to perform in a specific healthcare setting can be complex, there are three basic steps to developing IDP that healthcare providers must take.
- Identify the unstructured data and where it is located: Unstructured data can exist in hardcopy format. Or it may be in digital format and reside on multiple content management systems, third-party systems, specialized imaging systems, mobile devices and other locations.
- Consolidate the data: This involves scanning in hardcopy data sources and combining that with existing electronic data. This data can then reside in a single location, making it easy to access all the medical information that exists on any given patient. It also helps centralize data management, access and sharing.
- Integrate the repositories: The final step in implementing IDP is to integrate the various systems in which the consolidated data resides. This will ensure that all unstructured data can easily be viewed alongside structured data by any healthcare provider in any location. This enables full interoperability of the healthcare system, which ultimately improves patient care.
Take the Next Step in Data and Information Management
Ampliforce is a global leader in automation. We have an experienced team of automation experts who can help you develop an IDP solution to meet your data management needs.
Contact us today and speak with one of our IDP specialists about how to get started on your automation journey.