Ask the Expert: What is Auto-Indexing and How Does It Work?
Author: Ruchi Medhekar, SVP, Strategy & Platform
The sheer volume of new patients flooding hospitals and health systems has created a new set of challenges for healthcare providers to overcome. One of the most critical issues is the need for capturing, organizing, and sharing information to create more complete patient records, expedite workflows and recover lost revenue.
Auto-indexing software helps hospitals accomplish these key objectives by quickly and accurately transforming documents into structured, reliable data. There are many ways this automation software is helping healthcare providers handle modern-day medicine’s challenges. Join us as we explore answers to the questions: “What is auto-indexing software?”, “How does it work?”, and “What benefits can be expected?”
First, What is Auto-Indexing Software?
Auto-indexing software is a document conversion program that can scan, store and file documents into an optimal and usable format. It works by reading each page of a document before scanning mapped fields into an indexed text file, making it searchable through database queries. This process eliminates the need for manual indexing at hospitals, creating more efficient workflows and a yielding wide range of additional benefits.
Taking this process several steps further, Vyne Medical’s Trace® platform also captures and integrates data from voice, fax, and document images, compiling the information into a searchable, centralized database for easy access across the enterprise.
How Does Auto-Indexing Work?
To accomplish these tasks, auto-indexing software is trained to recognize certain types of patient demographic information in client-provided forms. The software learns to recognize patterns in unstructured information and converts it to structured, easily accessible data. The data is then automatically retrieved, classified, and populated into the appropriate fields.
The Auto-indexing technology leverages advanced machine learning and form recognition technology that works together to read incoming text data, map it to targeted fields, and incorporate it into the patient record, all within the same system.
In addition to reducing manual effort for your administrative teams, other benefits of these processes include improved quality of data, reduced costs, and tangible time savings.
What Types of Documents Are the Ideal Fit For Auto-Indexing?
The best documents for auto-indexing are high-volume forms that account for a significant portion of a hospital’s weekly fax volume. This allows for consistent, repeatable data extraction. The forms should be text-based, not hand-written, and contain compatible data fields such as blocks for name and address data rather than checkboxes or bubbles.
What Are the Benefits of Auto-Indexing?
Leveraging automated data capture and indexing helps improve data integrity, enhance productivity, and reduce cost. Automatically indexing data to the patient record reduces the burden of manual data entry and creates a significant opportunity to gain workflow efficiencies while reducing the incidence of human error. These auto-indexing benefits can help elevate service levels, reduce overtime expenses, improve patient throughput, and enhance financial outcomes. Let’s explore each of these benefits in further detail.
Elevate Service Levels
Beyond increasing the speed of work, automation is able to help healthcare providers deliver better patient experiences through more efficient and higher-quality interaction. By automating the indexing process, hospital staff can create more streamlined workflows, getting patients the care they need more efficiently, more effectively, and with a greater degree of accuracy.
Automation also provides a faster turnaround time for the patient, resulting in shorter wait times and increased rates of patient throughput. In fact, hospitals that implement a high-performing auto-indexing software report reductions in their order backlogs and the ability to provide care for more patients.
Reduce Costs
The labor that is saved through automation typically results in a lower cost per document processed for hospitals. Cost savings are driven by increased speed and accuracy that require fewer downstream error corrections. This creates a more efficient care team and results in less overtime pay unnecessarily going out the door!
Save Time For Hospital Staff
Without auto-indexing, employees are required to manually open each inbound document, search for the required fields, interpret information, and hand-key patient data. With auto-indexing, inbound documents arrive with common data already classified and pre-populated into the appropriate fields in Trace. The work happens quickly and seamlessly behind the scenes, giving staff time to work ahead and accomplish more.
What Benefits Have Trace Software Users Experienced?
Hospital clients using our proprietary auto-indexing solution have experienced time savings, productivity increases, and cost reductions. A few of our favorite success stories are outlined below.
One client reported a 50 percent time savings in order reconciliation and a 3-week reduction in the hospital’s order backlog. Overall, the solution has enabled this hospital to anticipate workload more accurately, reduce the need for paid overtime and increase patient outreach for procedure scheduling.
Another client experienced record lows in abandoned call rates and hold times as a result of auto-indexing. Schedulers are now able to work orders immediately, improving processing time by 40 percent and eliminating the order backlog.
Auto-indexing has also been shown to help improved satisfaction among staff by allowing them to reduce manual tasks and redirect efforts to more meaningful and engaging activities.
How Do I Get Started with Auto-Indexing?
We are confident we can help your hospital reduce costs, drive workflow efficiencies and enhance profitability with auto-indexing. To get started, reach out to a Vyne Medical sales or support representative and schedule a demonstration. To ensure that we align with your goals and processes, we will conduct a brief workflow assessment and technical review. Then, you’ll be on your way with auto-indexing.
Contact us to schedule a call with one of our Vyne Medical solution experts today.