Which Healthcare Processing Workflows Benefit from Digital Mailroom Solutions?

Digital mailroom solutions are permeating healthcare organizations—and for good reason. Going digital has tangible benefits such as faster processing and higher accuracy, which enable a better revenue cycle as a whole. 

A digital mailroom is defined as an evolution of the traditional mailroom that incorporates machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide services such as document intake and scanning, data capture, and automated sorting. 

If you’re exploring whether digital mailroom solutions could have a place in your practice, it’s helpful to analyze some specific administrative workflows that benefit from digitization. 

7 Healthcare Processing Workflows that Benefit from Digital Mailroom Solutions

Digital mailroom solutions have the potential to plug into nearly any portion of healthcare claims workflows. Oftentimes healthcare IT teams find it helpful to test out automating portions of workflows in order to realize the benefits before rolling out a completely automated process. 

The below examples show a portion of different workflows within healthcare that easily can be digitized to make processes faster and increase accuracy:

• Paper to Digital

In the simplest of terms, digital mailroom solutions take the manual burden of scanning physical documents into digital copies from in-house teams.

• Claims Processing

Digital mailrooms use automation to speed up claims intake, processing, and coordination of benefits, including any attachments. 

• 835 Destination Routing

Once paper EOP to 835 conversion is complete, digital mailrooms can route the 835 files to their appropriate destination for faster payment reconciliation.

• Routing

Healthcare correspondence needs to be routed to different entities depending on the type of document. Digital mailroom solutions enable the tracking of automatic routing of files at a reduced rate of error than manual routing. 

• Auto-Adjudication

A digital mailroom is equipped for auto-adjudication, which uses machine learning and automation to pay or deny insurance claims without having to physically review each one.

• Communication between Disparate Systems

One of the benefits of outsourcing mailroom services to a vendor such as Smart Data Solutions is that we process various form types with different requirements and routing destinations. Vendors for digital mailroom solutions are equipped to handle the disparate communication required between different systems to submit, receive and request information. 

• HL7 FHIR Capabilities

Data interoperability requirements are increasing as new regulations work to tear down communication silos that prevent data sharing. Working with a digital mailroom vendor can help healthcare IT teams overcome the hurdle of technical expertise required to implement HL7 FHIR. 

Healthcare mailrooms will always maintain paper for a portion of their operations to some extent, and even though this won’t change, digitizing portions of workflows aids in-house teams with faster processing times and fewer errors that slow down workflows.

Get Started with Digital Mailroom Solutions

Whether you already know you need to automate your workflow, or you could benefit from guidance around which portions of workflows make sense to automate, Smart Data Solutions is equipped to dig into the details and provide next steps to move forward. 

See how we helped a large Blues client enhance their correspondence processing workflow and reduce the overall cost by 37%. Read the case study.