Optimizing Data Capture Through

EMR Systems

About the Client

Our client is one of the largest medical groups in the United States, providing healthcare services to patients across the country. Maintaining multiple locations with an abundance of data, they approached Vee Technologies with an interesting challenge, to automate their medical coding reporting process.

Problem


Medical coders were extracting non-PHI data from over 200 EMR systems for the purpose of reporting productivity and accuracy, a task that was completed daily. At the end of each day, the coders were required to pull their own individual productivity data and enter it into the reporting system. From there, supervisors would extrapolate the data and build out their customized reports.

The time and effort required by the coders to manually consolidate the data and then enter it into the system reduced coding productivity drastically, as time spent pulling reports was time lost coding charts. Furthermore, the time that supervisors spent building out the final reports reduced their time spent on quality assurance and training.

Revenue began to decrease as accuracy issues increased. A deeper dive into the data showed that the decline in revenue was attributed to a 20%-40% increase in coding errors. A decision had to be made whether to hire additional resources for quality assurance checks or go a different route and look into automation.

Solution


Vee Technologies was brought in on a consulting basis to review the current processes and identify the appropriate steps it would take to achieve the desired outcome. After a thorough analysis of the coding process, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was identified as the ideal solution to the client’s problem.

By implementing bots, the coding data could be extracted daily from the various EMR systems and transferred directly into the reporting system. This would reduce the time that the coders spent manually extracting the data, thus increasing time spent coding, while also increasing accuracy as human error was removed from the data transfer process. Additionally, bots could be deployed in the reporting system to compile the necessary data, which would allow the supervisors to concentrate on quality assurance and training.

Result


15 bots were deployed that ran daily to extract and transfer the data into the reporting system, from there the reports were auto-generated for review. Coders were only required to update the status for each account and send the data for QA verification. Implementing this improved process drove productivity by 50%, while simultaneously achieving 95%-100% data accuracy. With quality and accuracy of the data established, the coding supervisors were able to concentrate on coding accuracy and training, further improving revenue.

What was once a manual process that impacted coding production and data accuracy had been transformed into an automated process that changed the way the organization operated. Within 5 months, revenue soared $15M while maintaining 95%-100% accuracy scores. Impressed by the capabilities of RPA and Vee Technologies, additional process improvements have been implemented system-wide and the relationship continues today.