Unlock Value for Your Healthcare Organization with a Digital Mailroom

Steps and Insights to Save Time and Resources

The Opportunity

Yes, our highly automated digital world still manages to include the lingering existence of paper mail. Mail correspondence from payers, vendors, attorneys, patients, other providers, government agencies, financial institutions and ‘junk’ mail all still make their way into your healthcare provider mailrooms across the continuum of care. The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) suggests that implementing a digital mailroom accordingly can save up to 60% on related mailroom operational costs.

Digital Mailroom presents an opportunity for your provider organization to take another step in your organization’s digital transformation journey. Steps include establishing conversion of the mail into electronic form by a Digital Mailroom service with intelligent automation, leading to valuable process outcomes for your care settings and virtual support teams.

You can motivate your healthcare organization accordingly to organize, gather, analyze and decide on a Digital Mailroom transformation.

The Steps

Organize

Define what success will be for your care provider organization with adoption of a Digital Mailroom with intelligent automation. Typical success criteria for a healthcare organization’s Digital Mailroom include process timeliness, security, cost savings, impact on reimbursement/budget and staff satisfaction. For example, a McKinsey & Company study found that digital mailrooms can reduce processing times by up to 90% for documents and information.

Assemble a project team to include stakeholders from all levels and areas in your care provider organization that will impact the success of Digital Mailroom adoption. Among those to include are departments using mail received (e.g.-revenue cycle, health information management (HIM), accounts payable, human resources and legal), IT services supporting the applications used by staff based on the mail received, financial value analysts and the current mailroom staff. Confirm alignment among all those involved about the intended success factors of the Digital Mailroom initiative.

Gather and Analyze

In this phase, your team’s involvement with stakeholders will benefit the Digital Mailroom transformation as follow:

• Your current mailroom leadership and staff will be able to walk through the current receipt and distribution process to be analyzed and documented.
• Departments receiving mail will be able to identify what is being received and document how it is used in areas such as revenue cycle, HIM, accounts payable, human resources and legal.
• IT will assist departments with defining and documenting the scope and impact of effort required to adopt Digital Mailroom technology and its integration into the core software application system processes of the care provider organization: the Patient Accounting System (‘PAS’), Electronic Medical Record (‘EMR’) and Enterprise Resource Planning (‘ERP’) applications.
• Your financial value analysts will be able to help quantify the value of process efficiencies and budget impact.
• IT and value analysts will assess the nature of mail received, how it is handled and number of locations receiving mail. They will also document the mail content to be automated and volumes of mail received.
• IT will determine what technology is currently available, or gaps that exist at your organization related to any digital capture, storage, integrated access and use of mail capability.

Based on what your team gathers, an analysis can be made of the opportunities aligned to success criteria for mail receipt, conversion of mail to digital form and automation of the digital mail into integrated workflows.

A couple of best-practice approaches exist to analyze when determining where mail is received and scanned into digital format.

1. Centralized secure mail receipt into a PO Box, from which a third-party vendor securely takes the mail to be opened and scanned at its off-site facility. This option allows your healthcare organization to avoid maintaining mailroom space and scan equipment, as well as training your staff at your healthcare locations.
2. Receipt of the mail at a central location among your existing healthcare settings is also an option, in which third-party vendor staff securely opens and scans mail. This option also allows your organization to avoid acquiring and maintaining scan equipment, yet square footage onsite at your location is required.

Note that intelligent capture technology is capable of recognizing, classifying and data tagging mail to types of documents for the eventual mail users as it is being converted into .TIFF or .PDF formats.  An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) application will also likely be a key bridge from the Digital Mailroom to your PAS, EMR and ERP.

Interface with an existing legacy ECM or establishment of a new ECM application instance at the provider must be considered, as the recognition, classification, tagging and integration of digitized mail will be leveraged by an ECM.  It will ensure mail users can quickly and efficiently access and decision on the information from where they are already familiar working including your organization’s E-mail, PAS, EMR and ERP applications. Common application IT integration techniques are available to link the digitized mail to those core systems through the ECM.

Decide

Your team can consider establishment of a Digital Mailroom all at once or in stages based on how it impacts the organization clinically and financially. Process value analysis results from your financial and IT services teams will provide insight about which mail and its related process provide stronger value impact. Quantifying value around improving workflows involving payer/patient correspondence, more accurate claims reimbursement, legal correspondence and better management of budget spend can all lead to decisions about which mail locations and related departments to focus on first.  On the other hand, a case may be made to address them all at once.

Choosing the best fit of technologies and vendor partners for the handling and conversion of mail is a key part of your decisions. Decisions about what capture technology, digital file format preferences, metadata tagging automation, ECM involved and integration to PAS, EMR and ERP applications are all elements to determine Digital Mailroom adoption value.

The Outcomes

Your team’s journey to establishing a Digital Mailroom with intelligent automation will result in several key outcomes including those with quantifiable value:

1. Timeliness– Faster access to documentation will allow your staff to improve timeliness of acting on the information where needed, in areas including patient accounting, HIM, accounts payable and legal. This will facilitate financial decision accuracy, patient care decisions and risk mitigation.
2. Security– Access controls around PHI, financial and legal information received will be bolstered by the digital mailroom receipt process and integrated intelligent automation of capture, identification and integrated access to content from the line of business applications your team is already authenticated to use.
3. Labor Savings– Costs will be reduced because staff will be able to handle more information efficiently without searching for mail content or manually getting it to correct staff.
4. Budget/Reimbursement– Operational budget will be used more with less Capital budget required. Budget and physical space to handle and store the mail can also be converted into reimbursement generating care settings and/or administrative staff areas.
5. Staff satisfaction– Administrative staff and care providers will be using the information in their financial or care workflows, instead of manually handling mail to incorporate information into an ERP or EMR.

Take the steps toward a Digital Mailroom with the Konica Minolta team! Your care organization will see the valuable outcomes from the intelligent automation ultimately add to the resources available for your care settings to sustain and grow the delivery of care to your communities being served. For more information, please feel free reach out to me directly via email.