Does your office staff have stacks of paperwork to sort through? Of course, they do. Not only does your healthcare team need to keep up with patient records, insurance documents, and billing statements, but record requests can be a continual task cutting into the time your staff members could be spending with patients.

Is ROI Draining Your Resources?

The truth is, most healthcare organizations are already tight on resources. Profit margins in the industry can be small, making it hard to keep up with bills and the healthcare industry’s ever-changing regulations.

The release of information process is an essential aspect of patient care and the overall healthcare industry, but it can drain your staff’s productivity if not done correctly. With high requester call volumes, lengthy, page-by-page review processes, and necessary compliance guidelines, it is no surprise many healthcare facilities place ROI at the bottom of their priority list.

Wasted Time

As a small experiment, add up the minutes (or hours) in a week your staff is spending on ROI, including phone calls, emails, and snail-mail. It will not take you long to see how a large percentage of the workweek is dedicated to fulfilling requests. Now, include the cost of labor hours and lost resources, and it’s easy to see how your ROI process is cutting into your profit margins.

Here are five common ROI issues negatively impacting your office:

1. Phone Calls: An initial phone call request can take substantial time to gather the patient’s necessary information and details, but it’s also common for requesters to call multiple times needing status updates and request progress. With frequent calls and significant time addressing requester inquiries, telephone communication is a noticeable drain on resources.
2. Incomplete Information: What happens when requesters don’t include vital information needed to process a request? That’s right, you and your staff have to figure out how to get the appropriate information (see number 1 above) to submit the request. To alleviate this black-hole of inefficiency, find an ROI solution that allows requesters to electronically upload all the required request information.
3. Paperwork: As the stacks of paperwork start to pile up, your staff members begin to worry and become overwhelmed. It takes a tremendous effort to sift through mounds of paperwork in a timely sense. In addition to the vast amount of information included in a request, you may also need plenty of office space to store all the documentation correctly. That is why we suggest you move your records system to a digital one.
4. Inefficient Workflow: How often are tasks duplicated or fall to the backburner? Without a good workflow, multiple staff members may be working on the same request without knowing it. Furthermore, you may never see a request’s status – submitted, in review, released, etc. – a pivotal component to satisfying requester needs. If you want to boost productivity, knowing who is working on a request and when is critical.
5. Improper Training: Staff members who are improperly trained (or not trained at all) to compliantly process requests take more time to complete a request. However, there is an even higher risk with untrained staff – a data breach. Data breaches and HIPAA violations lead to expensive fines and a lack of patient confidence.

It’s easy to see where an organization can lose valuable time throughout the ROI process (hint: administrative tasks). If you are interested in improving your ROI, we provide the solutions to free up your staff’s time and positively impact your requester’s and patient’s experience.

To learn more about our release of information solutions, please contact us for a discovery discussion or schedule a demo.