February 11, 2021 - Salesforce recently announced that it will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) for machine learning document automation in its healthcare cloud offering.

The new technology for healthcare and life sciences organization will increase digitization in management processes and minimize administrative burdens, reduce potential costly errors, and improve the overall patient experience, the company said.

The technology product, called Intelligent Document Automation (IDA), is designed for use with another new Salesforce tool called the Intelligence Form Reader, powered by Amazon Textract. 

The Intelligence Form Reader taps into optical character recognition (OCR) to help increase accuracy of health document workflows, from processing patient referrals to patient services program enrollment, all on one platform.

Many companies today extract data from scanned documents, such as PDFs, tables, and forms through manual data entry, which is slow and time-consuming, Amit Khanna, VP of Health Cloud at Salesforce, explained in the announcement.

Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that was launched in 2019, automatically extracts printed text, handwriting, and other data from scanned documents.

The service works to combat these issues by instantly reading and processing any type of document, extracting printed text, handwriting, forms, and other data without the need for any additional efforts.

Provider, payer, pharmaceutical, and medical device organizations can simplify how they process and manage their documents through IDA for Health Cloud, Khanna stated. 

Salesforce intends for the technology to help unify the end-to-end document lifecycle on a single platform. This means that healthcare and life science organizations can receive, process, and track all patient and plan member forms in one place, Khanna said. 

Khanna noted an example of an intake coordinator at a home health agency who can log into the healthcare cloud to pull a patient referral, edit or remove irrelevant pages, attach the document to the right patient record, and confirm relevant patient data was attached to the right fields within the cloud platform.

Then, if any information is incorrect, the intake coordinator can edit and update the field if needed.

IDA technology can also help to streamline document intake with intelligent routing by using machine learning to read incoming documents and help personnel to route data to the right place. 

Payer organizations, for example, can set up routing for prior authorization requests sent by fax to categorize them based on date, priority, or request time. The routing helps these organizations speed up the authorization process, a major pain point for both providers and payers. 

Additionally, IDA can drive efficiency and accuracy with standardized checklists. Customers are able to apply a pre-configured checklist of items to be completed when documents are available. 

Checklists help to enhance consistency and accuracy. One example would be a pharmaceutical company ensuring all relevant items are collected, recorded, and tracked before enrolling a patient into a care program for a drug trial. 

Lastly, Khanna explained that IDA technology can help to boost employee productivity by decreasing manual data entry.

OCR technology and machine learning help to accurately extract data and populate the text into the fields in the healthcare cloud, which allows organizations to automate manual data entry and process documents faster.

Healthcare and life science industries continue to rely on legacy systems, faxes, and paper documents to manage patient records and communications, Salesforce said.

Legacy systems were designed to meet hospital-specific goals and needs in the past, but are now outdated and stunt organizational growth. 

Therefore, there are some major operational challenges, including receiving documents across multiple channels and manually entering and re-entering information into different applications, like electronic health records. 

Oftentimes, organizations struggle to find the correct document for the right patient when it is needed quickly.

Being unable to find documents in a quick and efficient manner makes every-day processes, like enrolling patients in a care program, managing the patient referral and intake processes, or verifying prior patient authorizations, challenging.