Through two years of partnership, Reval Group helped to expand the scope and impact of automation at one of the largest secular nonprofit healthcare systems in the United States. Through carefully curated solution design, a small tactical squad of interwoven IA experts has successfully integrated several advanced technologies to transform the organization’s Population Health Management.

Problem

Banner Health worked with Reveal Group to review potential solutions for processing handwritten documents. Reveal Group’s IDP specialists used their infrastructure, sample cases, and scoring methods to assess four solutions using the organization’s standard documents. After a thorough assessment, Reveal Group chose SS&C Document Automation as the best solution due to its ability to extract structured handwritten forms from physicians.

Solution

With several use cases in the pipeline, Reveal Group and the healthcare organization’s Intelligent Automation team first addressed the Prior Authorizations process. Reveal Group’s multi-solution design reuses Blue Prism components notably applied to the organization’s automated patient fax process, which was recognized in 2023 at the SSON Awards. Building off a previously successful solution was a great starting point but required the bright minds of our innovation team to tackle the Prior Authorization process.

The Prior Authorization process required identifying and isolating critical pages before converting the handwriting to digital text. This is where ABBYY Vantage came into play. ABBYY Vantage separates the Prior Authorization pages from the fax, which Blue Prism Digital Workers store for downstream processing. The Prior Authorization pages are then fed into Blue Prism Document Automation to convert over 30 variations of handwritten templates and extract the data to CSV. The CSV file is then sent to Acuity Medical Billing for review, approval, and additional document requests.

Impact and Benefits

Integrating ABBYY Vantage and Blue Prism Document Automation with C TWO’s Automation Orchestration was pivotal in meeting regulatory service-level agreements (SLAs) and reducing control room operating expenses. This multi-solution approach has significantly improved operational efficiency, notably decreasing the workload of registered nursing teams by addressing a backlog of handwriting-based use cases.

• Efficiency Gains: The solution streamlined the handling of approximately 250,000 prior authorization pages in 2023, with faxes ranging from 12 to 60 pages. This integration significantly reduced the administrative overhead, demonstrating the tangible efficiency gains from the technology integration.
• Time Savings: The process alone demonstrates that combining Blue Prism and ABBYY Vantage could drastically reduce troubleshooting times.
• Scalability: The successful pattern of splitting large faxes and processing handwritten documents with Document Automation has been applied to other processes, such as Imaging Orders, resulting in substantial time savings and improved accuracy.

This success laid the foundation for adopting ABBYY Vantage and Blue Prism Document Automation across different processes to ingest faxes, separate forms from supporting documents, and convert handwriting to machine-printed text. This solution not only significantly improved business operations but also had a profound impact on patient care, ensuring faster and more accurate processing of medical documents.

Looking forward

Banner Health continues to explore the potential of cognitive services, artificial intelligence, and on-demand RPA to enhance its Intelligent Automation capabilities further. The business’s top-down support for automation initiatives enables it to add new capabilities to its portfolio and embed operational departments across its organization to identify and create efficiencies. As its automation program matures, team members have gained the requisite operational background and technology training to ensure optimal outcomes and faster build turnaround times.