One of the most vital aspects of the healthcare industry is the medical equipment millions of patients depend on to maintain a safe and secure standard of living. In the U.S., more than 2 billion consumer medical devices are sold each year, and that’s just brick and mortar!
The process for both the durable medical equipment (DME) providers and patients to obtain equipment often comes with a lot of paperwork – prior authorizations, payer qualifications, order, routing, and billing forms – all requiring a plethora of information juggled between patients, healthcare providers, and insurance representatives. Getting all this information processed promptly and accurately can be a major undertaking.
Many DMEs and medical device companies are adopting data entry automation software, streamlining medical equipment sales using intelligent document processing. Data entry automation is faster, more accurate, and less expensive than traditional manual data entry methods.
Let’s take a look at how data entry automation through intelligent document processing can improve the medical equipment sales process, helping satisfy providers and patients alike.
Traditional Medical Equipment Sales Data Entry Methods
There are two main approaches medical device companies have traditionally taken to manage the data involved in medical device sales.
1. In-House Manual Data Entry
One traditional approach to entering sales data is to do it completely manually. Because this industry relies heavily on analog media — such as paper forms, handwriting, and fax — finding relevant data points traditionally requires a person to read documents and physically type information into a form or software program.
This approach comes with some major downsides:
- It’s slow, delaying revenue cycles and access for patients.
- It’s vulnerable to human error.
- It’s a tedious and painstaking process.
- It’s an expensive waste of talent.
2. Outsourced Manual Data Entry
Most medical device companies are fairly small, with 73 percent having fewer than 20 employees. It’s no wonder that many companies choose to partner with a third party vendor (often located overseas) to handle labor-intensive manual data entry.
This approach saves your people from having to dedicate time and effort to monotonous tasks, but it still has many of the same downsides as in-house data entry, along with some unique downsides of its own:
- It’s still slow.
- It still allows room for human error.
- It’s expensive, possibly more so than keeping the work in-house.
- It adds another layer of complexity to your value chain.
- It poses privacy concerns for HIPAA compliance.
How Does Data Entry Automation Work?
Automating data entry is an entirely different approach to managing medical device sales data. Data entry automation takes advantage of modern technologies to remove the burden of manually scanning through documents and entering information into business systems.
So, how does it work? Optical character recognition (OCR) digitizes text contained in physical documents or scans, allowing you to rapidly search for keywords and copy and paste as you would with a digitally native document. This initial step can make data entry much easier because it allows your staff to quickly search for the keywords they need to determine a patient’s eligibility, route orders, and perform other important tasks to facilitate a sale.
However, document digitization alone is not data entry automation. Notable Systems pushes it a step further with proprietary software that knows what data points you’re looking for in a document. The system can extract data points and deliver them in a more digestible format so you never have to manually search through a document. Our data entry software can even automatically integrate the digitized data into your business systems, saving you even more time and effort.
For example, the system could take a fax of a patient’s medical record, digitize the contents, find diagnoses and test scores to determine the patient’s eligibility, and then share this data and the determination with the patient’s insurance provider. Humans can still be involved in the process as much or as little as desired, but the technology makes it possible for companies to confidently and accurately facilitate their sales processes with very little need for human eyes.
Advantages of Data Entry Automation
Using data entry automation tools comes with some major advantages for medical device companies. Compared to manual methods:
- It’s much faster, so you can potentially get devices in patients’ hands faster.
- It accelerates revenue cycles, leading to faster reimbursement.
- It saves labor costs or costs associated with a third-party service.
- It frees staff up to focus on tasks they’re more passionate about.
- It streamlines your overall approach to managing patient and sales data.
Streamline Your Medical Equipment Sales with Notable Systems
Data entry automation can revolutionize the way medical device companies manage sales for the benefit of their staff, their patients, and their bottom line.
Not really sure how to automate a data entry job? Notable has the technology in place to make it happen. We can work with your team to pinpoint the ideal solution for you, including the perfect balance of humans and data automation tools.
Want to learn more about how you can start using automation to empower your people, save time and money, and deliver better customer service? Schedule a consultation!
