When it comes to making healthcare decisions, providers rely on laboratory testing to determine their treatment plans. The CDC estimates that roughly 70% of healthcare decisions depend on laboratory test results, so it’s vital that lab diagnostics teams have all of the information they need to ensure that these tests are correct.
When information is missing, labs have to go through many manual steps to track it down, which delays testing and prevents patients from receiving the care that they need. Thankfully, MuleSoft, the leading platform to connect systems, automate workflows, and secure and scale APIs, offers solutions that automate document processing to help lab teams get the information they’re missing without swivel chairing across multiple systems.
Turning to automation for document processing
Why is automation important? The story is simple: IT teams are overwhelmed. Over the last couple of years, we have seen an increased demand in innovation projects, but organizations are working with the same or fewer resources. That creates a backlog that leads to frustration among stakeholders and delays business initiatives.
MuleSoft’s IDP (intelligent document processing) and automation package is here to help you alleviate some of those issues by streamlining these tasks and freeing IT to do the high-value work. At this point, MuleSoft automation is no longer a nice to have, it is a necessity. Nearly 60% of workers estimate that they could save up to six or more hours in a week by leveraging automation.
IDP is a feature that automates, extracts, and analyzes data processes using structured and semi-structured documents, such as purchase orders, invoices, any other origin document that you might have. And it does that in four simple steps.
- Document intake: This is the initial phase where you capture structured and unstructured documents, whether that is a PDF, invoice, form, or email. MuleSoft IDP leverages advanced technologies like ICR (intelligent character recognition) to digitalize these physical or scanned documents. This enables businesses to ingest this data from various resources, including legacy systems, web pages, images — whatever you might have.
- Document instruction: Once these documents are captured, MuleSoft IDP uses AI and machine learning to analyze the content of the document and extract the relevant fields of information. It identifies patterns, and it organizes data by filtering out irrelevant information to ensure that only essential data is captured for further processing.
- Data structuring: Extract unstructured or semi-structured data, and transform it into JSON. You are then enabling this data to be used downstream by any other pro system, whether it’s SAP, another ERP, Salesforce, or any other CRM. This data can be used by any system that is able to use web services.
- Integration and action: Now that you have completed all the previous steps, this final step involves integrating this data into downstream systems. Using APIs, this data can trigger further actions, such as updating a database, updating a record, triggering a new flow, or automating approval processes, completing the entire picture and enhancing productivity and accuracy.
Applying IDP and automation to lab diagnostics
We’re going to explore a lab diagnostics use case for this technology, but it is very easily translated into almost any healthcare situation where you have email, eFax, or other documents coming in. It all comes down to taking things that are not commonly structured and not easily organized into a standardized template and using intelligence to extract that data.
This scenario looks at the process of sending lab orders off to a diagnostics lab, processing those orders, and sending the results back to the doctor. In the diagnostics world, physicians are sending in lab orders all the time. Sometimes they’re entering them into a portal, or they’re using eFax, email, or calling things in. How do you get all of that information into one place and avoid some of the issues that most commonly happen?
One of those big issues is missing information. It could be anything related to the patient or the physician. Often it’s insurance, and as the lab is wanting to get paid, you want to make sure you close that loop so you can actually process the order because you have the insurance information. By using IDP and automating this workflow within Salesforce, you can reduce that manual data entry. You can actually improve the quality of the data that you’re capturing by removing keystroke issues and human error and automating the process.
Solving the issue of missing information
If you’re not familiar with the process of a lab order coming in, what happens is that the document will arrive and an employee will either scan or key this information in. In this case, we have an example where the insurance group number is missing from the order. In the past, this would be a very swivel-chair manual process. If somebody creates a case to track that down so they know that the order is not ready for processing, they’re going to swivel chair over to the lab information system, look in there and see if there’s a previous order from this patient, and see if they can pull their insurance information from that.
If they can’t find the information there, they’re going to swivel chair over to a payer system. They’re going to reach out and email or call the physician’s office, or perhaps even contact the patient and ask for that insurance information. Once they get that in, they close out the chase case that they were using to acquire that missing information, update the order, put that back in the lab system, and move on through.
Typically it will be passed to a couple of different people. It could take hours, or even a couple of days, to manage the process, and that could result in the order not being successfully completed. If you utilize MuleSoft’s IDP solution in conjunction with automations within Salesforce, you can streamline this whole process. If you ingest that file at the start of the process, when you get that order, you can identify that you’re missing key information.
You’ll generate the order record, but also automatically generate the chase case that says you need to go get that information. Since you know what information you’re missing, you can utilize standard email-to-case functionality within Salesforce to send a request out for that information. You can even automate the ability to provide that information back into the system by giving patients a link to provide an image of the insurance card. You can then pass that information back through the process. It can be automated end-to-end until the case is closed, the order is updated, and it’s sent to the lab for further processing.
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