Salesforce has announced Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) technology for healthcare and life sciences companies to digitize their document management processes. The new tool is powered by Amazon Textract, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) capability designed to extract printed text, handwriting, and structured data from documents using machine learning.
Healthcare and life sciences industries continue to rely on legacy systems, faxes, and paper documents to manage patient records and communications, Salesforce said. Legacy systems were designed to meet hospital-specific goals and needs in the past but are now outdated and stunt organizational growth.
The Intelligence Form Reader taps into optical character recognition (OCR) to help increase accuracy of health document workflows, from processing patient referrals to patient services program enrollment, all on one platform. The new technology for healthcare and life sciences organizations will increase digitization in management processes and minimize administrative burdens, reduce potential costly errors, and improve the overall patient experience.
Payer organizations, for example, can set up routing for prior authorization requests sent by fax to categorize them based on date, priority, or request time. The routing helps these organizations speed up the authorization process, a major pain point for both providers and payers.
Additionally, IDA can drive efficiency and accuracy with standardized checklists. Customers are able to apply a pre-configured checklist of items to be completed when documents are available, helping to enhance consistency and accuracy. One example would be a pharmaceutical company ensuring all relevant items are collected, recorded, and tracked before enrolling a patient into a care program for a drug trial.
Salesforce says that Nizhoni Health is already using Health Cloud to create a more efficient, personalized end-to-end referral experience for its patients and providers in the home healthcare community. Nizhoni will begin to roll out IDA to help its staff assign incoming referral documents from different sources, like fax and email, to patient records in Salesforce. IDA capabilities will be deployed to help Nizhoni, and ultimately other health organizations, to improve manual processing and deliver the right care to the right patients faster.
