Having made the springtime conference tours this year, conversing with numerous healthcare leaders about the industry’s financial challenges, it became clear that technology projects with immediate demonstrable ROI were the top priority. So, searching for low-hanging fruit, I discovered an exciting opportunity in Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).

While IDP is not a new concept, I was genuinely impressed by the advanced solutions offered by AWS. Their suite of IDP solutions has proven to deliver greater accuracy, efficiency, and speed compared to traditional options. According to a recent economic impact report from Forrester Consulting, AWS’ IDP solution yielded an impressive 73% ROI within a mere six months. One notable success story comes from Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan Inc. (CDPHP), a not-for-profit, physician-founded health plan:

• Improved ability to extract value from health data for enhanced member care and insights
• Achieved a remarkable 60% increase in overall efficiency with Amazon Comprehend Medical
• Streamlined information normalization from disparate sources into a standardized format
• Automated the HEDIS reporting process, reducing the time from 4–5 days to twice daily
• Assigned accuracy scores to incoming health data automatically

Despite the widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHR) and digital tools in the healthcare industry, processes continue to be hindered by PDFs, paper documents, and unstructured data. Astonishingly, healthcare is still responsible for approximately 70% of all faxes—an ironic survival of the fax machine amidst technological advancements.

While fax machines persist, there’s also speculation about the potential threat of human extinction in the face of Generative AI. Just something to ponder…

To illustrate the persistence of this problem, one needs to look at their own patient experience. Even with all the technological advancements, you will likely receive a paper or PDF intake form, bill, Explanation of Benefits (EOB), referral, prescription, or lab result during your healthcare visits within the past year. Additionally, there are numerous challenges in the back-end process, such as faxing or emailing PDFs between healthcare providers and payers.

AWS IDP provides a solution by enabling text extraction from various document types. It goes beyond mere extraction, understanding the sentiment between documents, and allowing manual validation of machine learning (ML) results for heightened accuracy and compliance. This not only saves time but also prevents errors. AWS offers pre-trained IDP ML models and services to create custom IDP ML models.

The benefits of AWS IDP are evident:

• Faster and more accurate document processing
• Improved document classification and entity recognition processes
• Simplified and expedited human review of machine learning models, optimizing the use of ML experts
• Enhanced productivity in text and data extraction and comprehension
• Increased security and scalability

Even if you currently have a legacy document processing system, it’s worth exploring the AWS IDP suite. Doing so may provide an opportunity to validate your existing processes or identify areas that require further digitization to address productivity and accuracy issues within your organization. Embracing the potential of AWS IDP can revolutionize document processing in the healthcare sector, benefiting providers and patients alike.