Automation is revolutionizing many industries, including the way healthcare companies are automating their document generation.
One of the most crucial success metrics in the healthcare industry is patient satisfaction and being able to retain them. This means keeping them comfortable, well-informed, and healthy within interactions with your company.
Crucial to patient satisfaction is speedy and efficient service that begins with a good document management system (DMS).
Document automation should pave the way for a whole new level of patient data security while upholding national standards and compliance.
In other words, whether you need to process 10 confidential reports or 100,000 test results, you can do so with a document generation system.
This is just one of the many benefits of automating document generation. There are many other reasons why you should go into document automation as a healthcare company.
But first here is a rundown of what you will learn below:
- What Document Generation Looks Like In The Healthcare Industry
- How to Automate Document Generation In Your Healthcare Company
- Top Seven Benefits When Automating Healthcare Documentation
- Render for Automated Document Generation For Your Healthcare Company
What Is Document Generation For Healthcare Companies?
As a healthcare professional, you probably already understand the importance of proper, HIPAA-compliant paperwork and patient document security.
It's a daily responsibility that can quickly take up valuable time that you could otherwise use for patient care.
Automating document generation can give you up-to-date records of your patient. It also keeps it within easy reach because it’s uploaded into a readily available system.
It can also make your patients feel the extra care from you because it sends them alerts for upcoming appointments and even gives them cost estimates.
Your patients will also have a much easier time because the pre-consultation process isn’t as tedious as filling out form after form manually.
They can now fill out those medical forms from the comfort of their own homes. They’ll also be able to have their payment mode saved on their file, skip the cashier line entirely, and pay using their device. Not to mention that now, they’ll always have their medical record at the flick of their fingers.
No more waiting for documents to be generated or sent manually!
Why is this important?
According to research:
- Administrative costs in healthcare in the US can reach up to 25% to 33% of total healthcare spending.
- Workers spend an average of 50% of their time creating, preparing, and managing documents manually.
- 83% of employees recreate existing documents from scratch because they can't find them in their company network.
Now, here’s the thing:
Most, if not all parts of the document lifecycle, can be managed safely with an electronic document management system. This includes steps like:
- Document creation.
- Editing or indexing for search.
- Sharing or delivering the document to the right user.
- Active use of the document and collaboration.
- Archival.
- HIPAA-compliant document archival or deletion.
And you can do this for almost all of your healthcare documents, whether it’s a patient information record, test result, medical history checklist, patient billing records, hospital discharge forms, and more.
For more info on this, see our full guide to document management lifecycle system.
Now, let’s get back on track with using automated document generation for healthcare companies. Below, we’ll cover how to automate this and then some example benefits that follow.
How to Automate Document Generation In Your Healthcare Company
Some patients go through multiple steps of the consultation process simultaneously. Therefore, ensuring that documents are updated is key to having a stable workflow.
It may seem complicated, but automating your documents will yield benefits that make you wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.
But first things first, what is automated document generation, and how is it done?
Automation of document generation is the preprogrammed creation of accounts, disbursement of the necessary forms to fill out, storing data, and delivering documents to clients.
This is one of the many ways you can streamline your business operations as a healthcare company.
However, there are certain requirements to implement this tool that you should keep in mind.
That includes:
- Data compliance.
- File accessibility.
- Document management.
- Templates.
- APIs.
- Document templates.
Here’s what that means.
Data compliance
Compliant document management is mandated by law for businesses to operate in the US.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that you, as a medical organization, must protect the privacy of your clients and customers.
You should also be transparent about the practices you employ in your data management and ensure that only the owner can access the information. There should also be timestamps when documents are made, delivered, opened, and sometimes even deleted for accountability purposes.
You should also notify your customer about any data breaches.
File accessibility
Document generation requires that you’re able to access your files through different devices and that they are readable through all these platforms. PDF is the most common file format used nowadays.
This also helps with securing information, with the option to add data encryptions and passwords to the document itself.
Another thing to consider here is that you can set up user roles and permission settings for your healthcare organization employees. This way, only certain people will be able to access certain documents.
For example, not everyone will be able to edit or send your sensitive customer information. And this helps ensure the chances of data leaks decrease drastically.
Document management
Document management means you’ll be able to create forms, retrieve documents, store data, and delete records for your clients. All in one place from your document management system.
You’ll also be able to track changes in the document easily with an audit log.
Application Programming Interface (API) documentation generator
An API is what functions as a catalyst for your workflow.
APIs will link the data from an HTML form to a PDF document wherever you collect results. Once converted, this file will get stored in the cloud.
API is important because this is what will connect your templates to your processes and clients.
See our full guide on document generation API for more information on how this works and how you can integrate it seamlessly into your ecosystem.
Templates
Because the healthcare field requires many different documents, it’s important to create a template that will be able to collect all the information that your clients and team members need.
This will significantly improve the service you’ll be able to render to your customers.
Some examples of healthcare document templates you can use to automatically generate include:
- Patient information records.
- Responsibilities and rights documents.
- Test results.
- Appointment confirmation.
- Billing and invoices.
- Insurance forms.
- And more.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the biggest benefits you gain when implementing the above into your healthcare organization's operations.
