Acuant Solutions Boost Accuracy and Efficiency in Healthcare

The healthcare industry has been embracing digital solutions, especially in the waiting rooms of healthcare providers. Instead of managing filing cabinets filled with paper, the staff at healthcare facilities are seeing the advantages of managing electronic patient records.

Healthcare providers have begun to rely on electronic registration methods when patients come in for their appointments. This includes self-service kiosks from Clearwave, which is the nation’s leading patient registration and insurance eligibility solution – and one of our key partners.

Clearwave offers self-service check-in registration stations that help healthcare providers standardize and automate administrative and patient-facing processes. While Clearwave’s solutions make it easier for healthcare facilities by digitizing data, the company still faced a challenge: typos.

Clearwave’s kiosks have patients type in their data, and some patients type in the wrong information. Small errors can often lead to significant problems for healthcare providers, including issues with patient mix-ups and rejected claims. The kiosk was able to read some magnetic strips on insurance cards, but struggled to read all types of insurance cards. Patients with paper cards had to type in their member IDs, which were long strings of numbers that could easily be mistyped. Mistyped member IDs were the most common patient error.

We partnered with Clearwave in an effort to optimize self-service registration. Acuant’s OCR capabilities allowed digitized information to be converted into text, and then populated into healthcare forms. This eliminates the inaccuracies that come with manually transcribing data, and saves time for employees who would rather be helping patients than copying forms. Acuant’s solution is used to gather accurate data from insurance cards as well, which cuts down on the number of rejected claims a healthcare facility sees. Claims that get rejected cause headaches for both healthcare practitioners and patients, and the issue can take months to sort out meaning a delay in payment.  OCR technology also makes it easier for healthcare workers to look up patient information.

Acuant’s verification and authentication capabilities are also a big benefit to healthcare practitioners, who have to abide by strict regulatory requirements. Healthcare providers can face lawsuits due to HIPAA violations if they accidentally share information with the wrong patient. This can be prevented by verifying patient IDs. Patient ID verification also helps cut down on insurance fraud, and identity theft.

Patients prefer to use self-service kiosks because they cut down on the time it takes to fill out forms. Patients want to be in and out of their doctor’s office as quickly as possible, and card scanning technology cuts down on the time patients would spend writing down or typing in information. With self-service kiosks, hospital systems have seen their patients spend 50% less time filling out forms, and 70% less time in waiting rooms. Healthcare practitioners can prepare patient charts an average of 9 minutes before the scheduled appointment time. Acuant’s card scanning technology provides both the practice and patients with numerous benefits, streamlining the workflow and optimizing the patient intake process.