The Problem
Ypsilanti, MI – Before implementing Freedom Imaging Systems’ Record, Image, Capture And Retrieval (RICAR) Business Process Management software, Pathology Business Services (PBS) had massive amounts of documents in banker boxes scattered throughout their billing department with very little on-site storage available for new documents. PBS is a billing service company providing claim production services for clinical laboratories and pathology groups from their Torrance, California offices. While they were a successful billing company, their new management recognized that storage was becoming an issue, and in addition they identified that they had no real and reliable source to monitor work volumes. Along with improving access to their billing source documents, they were also pursuing an effective way to easily manage their work and increase the efficiencies of their complicated billing processes.
PBS was able to maintain one to two months of their customer’s billing documents on-site; but after two months, older documents had to be shipped to a national off-site storage facility to make room for the seemly never-ending influx of new work to process. Often needing access to the off-site documents to complete billing associated tasks, PBS found that the process of retrieving the documents back to their organization for processing was expensive and time consuming. In most cases, it was 3 to 5 days for the $50 standard delivery of requested documents; if PBS needed next-day delivery they had to spend $75 plus a re-filing fee. Retrieval, transportation, and re-filing fees, in addition to actual storage costs, were mounting and running into thousands of dollars per year.
The claims process is inherently labor intensive to begin with, even if data is on-site; but the additional obstructed access to source documents and the management found that employees’ time and productivity was greatly hampered. Billing personnel were often not at their desk while looking for documents. Documents were often missing which just impeded productivity that much more for the growing billing department. This resulted in increases in labor costs, unnecessary patient statements, in-bound customer service calls and postage.
It was also very difficult to track the activity of individual employees. Reporting consisted of general reporting from their financial system that provided claims receivable totals. Billing employees were also required to spend approximately 30 minutes per day counting the volume of work processed each day that management consolidated into manually maintained reports. Other than the receivables totals and employee counts, PBS never had a dependable measuring tool that tracked the individual efforts of the billing personnel. Management had limited accountability for the handling of cases and it was nearly impossible to accurately measure and staff for the volumes of outstanding work. If the department started to get ‘behind’, they would add another ‘body’ to the staff of fifty employees either through temporary staffing or a FTE.
PBS first began using Freedom RICAR software suite for the scanning and archiving of requisitions, Explanation Of Benefits (EOB) and other administrative documents in February 2005. Documents were scanned as soon as they were received at the company, but because approximately half of the requisitions were altered with either hand written ICD-9 codes or results directly on the document, they were re-scanned to capture the additional hand written information. Although the originals were always available, the billing personnel had to work off the paper document in case additional information was written on the requisitions. The scanning redundancy, again, decreased productivity within the department and doubled the work unnecessarily.
The Solution
PBS’ new billing management looked to Freedom’s extensive billing experience and its FreeWf solution and to help improve their processes within the department. FreeWf is designed to work seamlessly with Freedom’s RICAR capture suite of products and automatically begins any workflow process at time of document capture. PBS scanned incoming requisitions for archiving and work was immediately queued digitally for billing processing which completely eliminated the manual handling of paper within the department.
With the implementation of the RICAR’s FreeWf workflow solution, PBS realized all of their objectives identified for improving the billing process. PBS’s storage issues ‘went away’, employees now had immediate access to all documents directly from their desktop computers. Productivity went up, labor costs went down and now ALL transactions were audited down to the level of each individual claim and employee.
Once PBS began using FreeWf, they no longer had to maintain documents on-site. Boxes that littered the department and storage room disappeared. Spare cubicles that once housed stacks of documents could now be used for personnel. A large storage room, that housed rows and rows of documents, was completely cleared out. View photos here.
Billing productivity improved dramatically. FreeWf eliminated the manual sorting tasks of four billing FTEs, these employees were kept and moved within the department for other processes. Employees rarely left their desk anymore since all their work was at their fingertips. FreeWf could automatically prioritize work based on the individual customers needs using RICAR’s priority queue’s features. The customer service department quickly and easily answered questions regarding individual patient transactions since FreeWf displayed all user names, dates and times of when each process was completed or where in the process it currently resided. Customers were not put on hold or promised a call-back since all the answers were just a few clicks away and could be answered during the original call. Call center hold times fell; call backs also were reduced.
PBS’ management could also now use Freedom’s report module, FreeReports, to identify exact work volumes and the aging of pending work for any given date and time. FreeReports produced reports that identified individual productivity by hour, day or week and each customer’s volume of pending work. Employees no longer needed to segregate documents by hand for processing or “count” the number of requisitions they had completed each day – workflow reports were run to do this automatically. FreeWf provided management with statistical data to measure and monitor work volume which created a means for employee accountability. With FreeReports, PBS could also track scanned batches by date & user, documents scanned per hour by scanner, user & date.
FreeWf’s Notes feature allowed all comments to be digitally attached to the archived record and PBS immediately started realizing a ROI by eliminating redundant and daily scanning and one FTE. Billing personnel never disappeared from their desks on expeditions to find lost documents; end-of-day manual quota counts were eliminated.
FreeWf permitted remote entry, or access to the RICAR system from home or a remote office. This allowed PBS to expand its labor market outside of the expensive California market into more economical regions. This allowed them to pull from an employment force with experience with the system, thus reducing training and employment investment costs.
PBS also took advantage of the remote capture features of RICAR and began deploying RICAR’s FreeScan capture software and Fujitsu scanners to their customer’s locations. PBS customers could now scan their documents at their site eliminating commercial carrier costs. Documents scanned at the remote customer sites would be securely uploaded to the FreeWf server allowing PBS to start processing customer’s work almost immediately and reducing the billing time from several days down to several minutes.
The RICAR imaging and workflow system provided answers to many everyday billing challenges such as document storage, scanning redundancies, and worker productivity. It was even a source for looking up demographics for repeat patients. PBS is a ‘greener’ company with Freedom’s RICAR solution as it now enables to distribute and email requisitions, which eliminated paper, supply cost, and storage. Freedom’s workflow solution, FreeWf, gave PBS “accession reports” which were non-existent prior to FreeWf, allowing a check and balance system for every patient record that was billed or reported.
About Pathology Business Services
Located in Torrance, Calif., Pathology Business Services (www.pathbiz.com) offers a wide range of business and practice support services for any size pathology practice. The organization provides billing, consultation, practice management, contract analysis and negotiation. Practice support services include immunohistochemistry technical services and e-pathology solutions to enhance anatomic pathology and transfusion medicine reporting. Pathology Business Services has the expertise to enhance all facets of any pathology practice.
About Freedom Imaging Systems
Freedom Imaging Systems, established in 1991, is a leading provider of rapidly deployable enterprise content management solutions. Freedom develops RICAR, an enterprise-class solution that combines integrated document management, business process workflow and electronic records management in a single application. RICAR allows organizations to manage digital content, including scanned paper documents, faxes, print streams, application files, electronic forms, web content, multi-media files, and e-mails. RICAR is used by Fortune 1000 companies to automate business processes, reduce the time and cost of performing important business functions, improve organizational efficiency and address the need for regulatory compliance through the management, control and sharing of digital content with employees, business partners and customers. Visit www.freeimage.com for more information.
For additional information please contact:
Freedom Imaging Systems
Phone: 734-327-5600
Email: information@freeimage.com
www.freeimage.com
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