Readers Write: Applying AI to Improve Patient Care

Applying AI to Improve Patient Care
By Tomas Gogar

Tomas Gogar, MS is co-founder and CEO of Rossum of London, England.

Despite the technological advancements in healthcare over the past decade, the administration and quality of patient care has not kept pace. The industry is faced with the realization that if technological changes aren’t implemented at a foundational level, providers, payers, and patients won’t be able to realize the full value of the technology available to them.

The majority of medical institutions rely on electronic health records (EHR) to input, read, and upload critical documents related to patient care into online portals. The EHR concept, introduced in the 1960s, while valuable to the healthcare community, has yet to eliminate the need for manual paperwork. Paperwork is a huge drain and cost, taking time, energy, and precise attention to detail to ensure that all documents are properly scanned into the correct patient files.

Missing information can lead to delays in care, misdiagnosis, miscommunication around treatment plans, and the duplication of costly tests and procedures. Relying strictly on manual processes to manage such large amounts of information can be administratively crippling to a healthcare organization. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 50% of all medical documentation mistakes result from administrative errors.

By integrating intelligent document processing (IDP) into the systems, hospitals and healthcare institutions save time, reduce operational costs, and improve workflows. Introducing an IDP system into the EHR workflow means medical professionals across departments can easily scan and upload documentation into a secure SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant operating system. IDP efficiently captures, categorizes, extracts, and classifies data from documents, streamlining the workflow process and reducing the paperwork necessary for a patient file.

IDP also helps sustain HIPAA compliance, which can be challenging when dealing with thousands of physical documents stored in different formats and locations across a health system. Accounting for small margins for human error causes long input times and exhaustive efforts to safeguard physical documents containing patient information. With the implementation of IDP, this process eliminates any chance of human error in handling sensitive information and allows for patient data to be processed quickly, safely, and securely.

From a patient perspective, automating and streamlining document processing enables providers to get complete, accurate data straight into a patient’s hands via online portals. From the healthcare organization side, IDP can reduce document burnout that healthcare professionals are prone to experiencing.

For hospitals struggling with overhead operational costs, implementing IDP is a lucrative resource. By using IDP to process documents like prescription referrals, lab records, billing, and claims forms, manual data entry is drastically reduced, thereby reducing the need for resources associated with data entry into EHR and patient portals and enabling the healthcare organization to re-allocate them to more strategic tasks. In addition to labor costs, implementing IDP reduces costs associated with paper storage, security measures in place to store these documents, and any costs associated with administrative errors.

During a time when all our hospitals are critically understaffed and underfunded, ensuring that every worker is given the necessary tools and resources to adequately and efficiently perform their jobs is more crucial than ever.