Scanning Technology

Barcodes Simplify Billing

Summary
A medical group practice of 50+ physicians wanted to maintain digital copies of patient information including, but not limited, to insurance cards, drivers licenses, referrals and authorizations. This group practice owns a scanning/document management system for scanning Explanation of Benefit forms. They wanted to utilize the system for scanning of patient information to support the billing effort but did not know how to proceed.

Weston recognized the problem and offered a proactive solution that was simple to implement. With 14 locations, the group could not afford to deploy expensive scanners to personnel who are not trained or capable of managing the equipment. They needed a low technology solution for a high-technology issue. Furthermore, the costs of connectivity would increase significantly with the bandwidth needed to send scanned documents from these remote locations.

Solution
The Weston Group designed a solution that is simple in approach. The front desk personnel would make copies of documentation and affix to each page a bar code label that they could generate from their host system. The bar code generation was not part of the host software. This was something that Weston implemented to complement the group practice management system.

These documents were sent to the central business office where they were scanned. As the high speed scanner scanned the pages, it would read the barcode representing the patient's ID and automatically index that patient's document. This index allowed a patient's data to be retrieved by entering their patient ID number. All documents for that patient would then be returned. This system is very stable and successful as a result of the low-tech approach combined with robust technologies occurred.

Benefit
Time that was previously spent tracking down an insurance card is now a click away. This solution, designed by Weston, is simple and user-friendly for front desk staff to manage, even if the practice experiences high turnover. The turnaround on this type of project is 40 to 60 hours. All of the heavy lifting is done by technology allowing this group to be highly successful in capturing information in a simple, cost effective and consistent manner.

Contact us for more information on how to establish an efficient scanning process.