No one chooses a career in healthcare for the paperwork. But providers know, collecting and analyzing patient information, filing required insurance paperwork, and a million other administrative tasks take time away from one-on-one patient interactions every day. Tedious tasks like data entry also increase staff burnout for medical professionals who want to spend more time on direct patient care.
What if you could dramatically reduce or even eliminate repetitive administrative tasks and free up your staff to help patients one-on-one instead? At Vital Interaction, helping providers implement technology solutions, including automating administrative functions, is what we do best. In the process, we help healthcare providers improve revenues, implement efficiencies, reduce costs, enhance staff retention, and provide better patient care.
One challenge facing providers we work with is tackling insurance eligibility and authorization requirements on behalf of patients. From Vision Insurers like VSP and EyeMed, Medicaid, to private companies, not every insurance provider makes it easy for providers to check eligibility and receive authorizations before a patient visits. Implementing processes to help your team reduce the time and effort it takes to accomplish this routine daily task will show immediate results. Here are some examples.
Healthcare Automation Use Cases from Vital Interaction
Answering patient questions about insurance: Our administrative staff are experts in the ins and outs of health insurance. They have to be, in part because many times patients aren’t experts themselves. For some patients, understanding the details on their own coverage, what is or is not included, and what the costs will be, is not easy. For providers, that means an investment in staff time to look up and answer patient questions. Vital Interaction’s automation solution reduces the amount of time administrative staff needs to look up timely patient information, freeing them up for more one-on-one patient attention.
Improving care by identifying wellness benefits: Most patients don’t take advantage of all of the benefits their insurance provider offers. From annual wellness visits to health screenings and free glasses to annual eye exams, if patients better understood what was available to them, they would increase the use of these important services. Empowering patients with information in advance gives them the opportunity and knowledge needed to access unused benefits, improves patient care, and strengthens retention efforts. Automating proactive administrative tasks like this can help grow your practice without adding unnecessary staffing time.
Straight Eligibility / Authorization – Some medical and vision insurance providers still do not interface with all systems, requiring staff members to manually check insurance eligibility. Implementing automation to reduce staffing bottlenecks like this will both improve patient flow and give staff more time to interact one-on-one with patients. We have created a process to check eligibility and provide success and exception reports for patients with non-standard insurance coverage that reduces staff time by 75% on eligibility and authorization checks.
In order to grow, your medical practice needs to identify and implement new ways to generate revenue and increase the quality of patient care. If you are not automating insurance workflows, you are missing out on daily patient interactions that your staff want to deliver. To learn more about how automation can strengthen your practice, contact our team today.