New Bedford Corporation faced the daily task of tediously entering patient care data into their Vitera Intergy Practice Management application by hand. Every week, thousands of medical charges – records with up to 40 different pieces of information including name, address, and specific treatment – from New Bedford’s 50 healthcare provider-customers were received, keyed into Intergy, and cross-checked for accuracy and insurance information. In doing so, the company risked keying errors, delays, and the legal implications inherent in handling sensitive medical information, not to mention the cost of employing workers to perform the job.
“It was a manual process, but for us, it’s not simply about entering information,” explains Jonathan Ferrell, president of New Bedford. “Sometimes the patient’s demographic information does not exist in our database and we need to request it from the provider. Sometimes we receive duplicate charges or tracking charges that shouldn’t be billed to insurance at all. There are decisions to be made along the way.”
After a careful evaluation of effectiveness, ease-of-use, and value, New Bedford Corporation chose Nintex RPA to automate their billing-data entry, which dramatically improved their productivity.
The challenge
New Bedford employees had to personally review patient records, recording and manually enter data like patient name, location, and treatment into their proprietary billing software. Here, codes and costs were assigned and the records are exported daily as a Microsoft Excel™ spreadsheet.
New Bedford’s previous process called for the exported data to be entered manually into Intergy. At up to 30 seconds for each of the 1,000 records daily, New Bedford needed as many as eight hours each day to load patient and billing data by hand.
The RPA solution
Nintex RPA now automatically copies patient data from New Bedford’s proprietary billing system and enters it into Intergy at a rate of up to six records per minute – a 62% time savings versus manual entry. Moreover, Nintex RPA works overnight, so employees are free during working hours to build value in other ways. “We can commit more time to other activities like following up with insurance companies for payment. This results in even greater revenue collected on the back end.” says Ferrell.
New Bedford estimates that Nintex RPA spares them from adding two full-time employees to perform their data entry tasks – a savings of up to $70,000 per year. And, just like a full-time employee would, Nintex RPA reacts intelligently to the data it encounters. Unlike a full-time employee, Nintex RPA enters the data with 100% accuracy.
“If a patient doesn’t exist in our system, Nintex RPA writes an error log. If there is a tracking charge that shouldn’t be billed to insurance, for example, Nintex RPA marks that charge directly to ‘patient responsibility.’” said Ferrell. “Foxtrot reacts when a problem is caught. We call that intelligent data entry.”
