Many industries have been very quick to adapt new technologies in the pursuit of maximum efficiency to cut administrative costs. You can file your taxes, apply to a university, or even make a doctor’s appointment from the convenience of your home computer. Any adjuster or case management professional can tell you that the time it takes to gather medical information on claimants can be daunting. For a host of reasons, physician’s offices have not been so quick to adapt electronic medical records. Even with the National Digital Medical Records Mandate or “ARRA” the ever advancing deadline of 2015 to switch to an approved EMR, many practices still rely on paper records and faxed or mailed records requests. In the realm of workers’ compensation, the need to obtain medical records quickly can equate to serious savings.
Quality First has tackled this issue by standardizing the receipt, storage, and dissemination of medical records for injured workers. Although each physician may have their own system for recording visit notes, prescriptions, work status forms, and bills, Quality First requires an electronic copy within 24-48 hours of the patient’s visit. These records are then cataloged instantly into an electronic repository. With a network that includes over 200 practice locations, this is no small feat. Once we collect and store the documents, we allow registered adjusters, case managers, employers, and any other authorized party to electronically request the documents needed. If there is a question regarding treatment or a particular document, users can also request a conference with a member physician or even schedule an IME. The average adjuster or case manager spends approximately 9.5 minutes calling for records, leaving messages, waiting for recordings, and sending faxes to receive information on a single claimant not to exclude additional calls, faxes, and recordings for a specialists office the claimant may also be seeing. This is the reason we have developed the AEGEANTM platform as an online method to request, review, and follow up on multiple claimants on a single platform.
We offer this tool to claims professionals as a way to spend less time on tedious clerical activities and more time to focus on core duties. An average request takes less than a minute to complete online at any time of the day, there is no waiting for an answering service, or for the office manager to get in for the day. A centralized method for requesting and retrieving records adds up to some serious savings for claims offices. For example, think of a workers’ compensation claims adjuster that has, on average, 125 claims in their total caseload. Updated medical information is needed on average about every two weeks. That means the adjuster may need to make up to 63 calls each week. This adds up to almost 10 hours just gathering updated records. If you multiply those hours by weeks and then break down how many work days are spent on clerical tasks, almost 65 days of each adjuster’s work year are spent languishing on phone calls. The average number of work days spent using the AEGEANTM platform to gather the same information equates to just 4.5 work days annually. When you start to factor in an entire claims staff and their annual salaries, the savings really start to stack up. Of course, technology cannot solve all our problems. That is why we have chosen specific providers that have vetted experience with workers’ compensation injuries and employer protocols to be a part of our network. The premise is simple; there are excellent providers who know how to get injured people back to work quickly and safely. Getting the information to the claims people should be straightforward. We are accomplishing this through standardization with use of the AEGEANTM platform. This is the kind of technological innovation that has the potential to put the work comp industry on the path towards increasing efficiency and cost savings.
