How Technology is Helping Doctors Reduce Office Costs

There is new technology in the form of AI-enabled insurance card scans, plus optical character recognition (OCR) and verification, that promises to help doctors reduce office costs.

How Technology is Helping Doctors Reduce Office Costs

Orbit Healthcare have conducted some eye-opening research into how this technology can help doctors reduce their administrative costs, which design agency Nowsourcing have turned into an excellent infographic.

Let’s look at some of the highlights from Orbit Healthcare research.

Inefficient and Error-Prone Manual Processes

Manually processing insurance details is a significant drain on both financial and personnel resources. There are many data entry errors either in capturing or keying-in patient intake information, or simply wrong insurance information captures. Other issues include lapsed coverage, incorrect payer information and inaccurate patient and payer details.

These combined issues are causing 25% of healthcare expenditures in the United States to be administrative overheads. This could be greatly reduced with automated scanning, OCR and verification.

In total, the US healthcare system currently wastes up to $850 billion every year on errors and inefficiency, with bad insurance data a contributing factor.

The Cost of Unverified Insurance

The research reveals that insurance claim errors directly waste $17 billion every year, while global healthcare providers lose around $30 billion per year through fraudulent or error-ridden work. With the correct technology, both healthcare providers and patients could benefit from total savings of over $16 billion.

A quarter of all spending on payment processing in the healthcare sector is currently being wasted by the likes of pricing failures and administrative complexities. It is clear to see that huge improvements need to be made.

New Challenges of Telehealth Providers

Telehealth involves the administration and distribution of health services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies. It differs from standard medical facilities in that telehealth providers often don’t have front office staff to help verify insurance details.

With Orbit Healthcare discovering that 74% of US patients are interested in using telehealth services, such providers will be increasingly dependant on reliable automated technology for insurance verification.

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This article, "How Technology is Helping Doctors Reduce Office Costs" was first published on Small Business Trends