By: Heath Dugas
The healthcare market is constantly evolving, and shifting regulations have long been a huge factor. Both the Affordable Care Act and HIPAA drastically changed the way healthcare organizations are run. Additionally, mergers and acquisitions have recently escalated, as companies look to address holistic patient care. In fact, the last quarter of 2018 saw two enormous mergers; first, CVS acquired Aetna in November. Then, Cigna and Express Scripts completed a $67 billion merger less than a year after initially announcing their intent to do so. This paired a top five health insurance payer with the single largest Pharmacy Benefits Manager (PBM).
Much of the impetus in this merger activity is the recent industry focus on patient satisfaction, particularly in light of the fact that satisfaction scores now affect Medicare reimbursements. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) has incorporated Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Services (HCAHPS) surveys scores into its payment system: higher scores result in higher payments. Additionally, at the end of the day, the reality is that patients are customers. Customers, when unhappy with the service received, can, and will, take their business elsewhere.
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While the landscape of the healthcare industry seems to be shifting continuously, there are a few mainstays—for example, documents have long been absolutely crucial to the healthcare industry, and there seems to be no sign of this trend slowing. For years, documents have been increasingly abundant in medical decision making—from establishing a plan of care, to determining the medical necessity of a procedure, treatment, or prescription request. Documents are constantly exchanged between physicians for collaboration on patient care, and there are also high volumes of documents constantly being exchanged between physicians and payers. So while the presence of documents has been constant in the industry, changes to industry standards have in turn changed the requirements for document processing
In the midst of the changing requirements around documents, Concord is perfectly positioned to meet the ever-evolving demands of the healthcare industry’s document exchange and processing. Fax continues to be the preferred method of sending documents in healthcare. Concord has been helping businesses send and receive documents using our secure, compliance-optimized cloud-based virtual fax network since 1996. We serve thousands of healthcare organizations, all of which are sending and receiving millions of pages a day through our secure, ultra-reliable platform. In an industry prone to customer turnover, we maintain 97% customer retention year after year.
Concord's document solutions go beyond fax; the documents that are being sent via fax typically have processes that need to be followed upon receipt. Often times, these documents need to have index data associated with them so that users can search for them later. Concord’s NEXTSTEP solution allows customers to convert images, or pictures of documents, into intelligent documents, by extracting the text from the image. NEXTSTEP also allows our customers to create rules driven workflows, that are easy to change as the document requirements do.
With shifts in regulations, as well as companies experiencing mergers and acquisitions, the healthcare market will likely always be constantly changing. And with these changes, the way that documents are required to be processed and handled also changes. For an industry that is extremely reliant on documents, this can be difficult to keep up with. To make document-based processing simpler and more effective for everyone involved, Concord provides integrated Cloud Fax and Cloud Capture + Workflow platforms.
To learn more about Concord Cloud Fax, download our Cloud Fax Reference Guide, which will outline the basics in how you should shop for a Fax service based on requirements around compliance, network security, and more. Or, to learn more about NEXTSTEP by Concord, you can download our eBook here and begin to find out more about how data capture and document processing can work for your organization.
Schedule a demo today; explore how NEXTSTEP can work for your organization, and start managing faxes more efficiently.