Intelligent Document Processing and its Applications in Healthcare

What exactly is intelligent document processing (IDP)? It's a new technology that allows organizations to automate document operations even for unstructured data like PDFs and photos. Intelligent document processing is sometimes known as IDP RPA since most IDP systems use RPA to automate documentation tasks.

How IDP RPA Work

IDP RPA solutions make use of a variety of technologies, including:

     • OCR: For the extraction of data from unstructured documents and conversion of that data into machine-readable representations.
     • NLP: To comprehend the extracted data's language and meaning.
     • Machine learning algorithms: For data classification and validation.
     • RPA: For automation of data processing and manipulation of tasks.

Computer vision is used to analyze the structure of a document, whereas OCR is used to collect and retrieve text from a document. 

IDP's Advantages in the Healthcare Business

Intelligent document processing provides various benefits to healthcare businesses. Some of them include:

     • Lower operational expenses
     • Preventing harmful human errors
     • Enhanced workflow
     • Data is easily accessible.
     • Enhanced data security

IDP Use Cases in Healthcare

Intelligent Document Processing has several applications in healthcare. Among the most frequent are:

     • Automated patient registration
     • Extraction of data from patient records

These two use cases will be discussed in further detail below.

Automated patient registration

Although technological advancements have digitalized some healthcare processes, there are still vast amounts of paper documents that must be handled.

A good deal of paperwork must be processed before admittance, particularly during the patient registration and administration process. When a patient is being admitted, the following papers are mostly needed:

     • Identification documents
     • Forms for patient intake
     • Insurance cards for health care
     • Prescriptions
     • Referrals
     • Types of blood

As an example, consider scanning insurance cards. The patient or the healthcare professional can automatically scan the insurance card during patient onboarding using IDP. The OCR engine reads the scanned insurance card and extracts the necessary information (patient name, insurance provider, insurance card number, etc.). Once extracted, the data is formatted in a machine-readable format that can now be processed and entered into the EHR system. Thanks to IDP, the administrative procedure has been reduced, allowing healthcare workers to focus on what is actually important: patient care. According to the earlier estimations, the advantages include cost savings by 660% and time savings by 33,000%. Healthcare firms may improve customer satisfaction and patient intake by minimizing patient onboarding time.

Extraction of data from patient records

Currently, manually transferring patient records to an EHR system is time-consuming and error-prone, which can lead to unwelcome litigation. Because paper forms are still commonly used, finding a solution to automatically sort, identify, extract, and match data from papers, faxes, PDFs, and scans to a patient's EHR is critical. Healthcare businesses may use IDP to optimize EHR workflows while maintaining patient care quality. Staff may easily gather patient records from emails, scanners, emails, faxes, mobile accessories, and portals and transfer pertinent data to an existing EHR system.

Fields that can be extracted from the patient's records using IDP include:

     • Number of medical records
     • The birthdate
     • Number of Social Security (SSN)
     • Name of the patient
     • Medical background
     • Type of blood
     • Name of the doctor
     • Dates
     • Prescriptions