Healthcare Industry Turns Focus to Streamlining Enrollment Processes

The healthcare industry looks to streamline the processing of enrollment forms through electronic portals and processing systems.

Throughout the healthcare industry enrollment processes remain largely paper based and complicated due to complex forms such as dirty forms, faxed forms, attachments, and hand-written forms. However, the healthcare industry's focus has increasingly turned to streamlining the process and increasing the number of electronically submitted enrollment forms.

Electronic portals and processing systems allow for electronic processing as well as a reduction in processing times. Some electronic portals and processing systems have all actions accessible via one detailed enrollment document view with options such as: approving the document, setting the document as new, setting the document as in progress, setting the document as complete, sending the document for re-indexing, sending the document for rescanning, and removing the document from the queue. A prime example of such a system is the Smart Data Solutions enrollment system. Additionally Smart Data is able to direct connect to all of your electronically submitting employer groups and subsequently edit and uniformly stage the data the employer group sends thus streamlining and simplifying the integration into the customers' system.

"Employers need a customized enrollment processing system that eliminates delays and improves quality within their unique workflow; Smart Data Solutions can provide that," affirms Pat Bollom, the company's co-founder. "Our system provides not only simple processing functions but also capabilities such as searching, updating, adding, and deleting on all enrollment forms."

The Smart Data system adds efficiency and accuracy to the enrollment process by removing the inherent delays and inaccuracies associated with paper processing. Smart Data Solutions is able to address the challenges associated with paper copying, scanning archiving, and reconciling. SDS believes that in order to add efficiency and accuracy it is important to develop data entry documentation with the client in conjunction with the implementation. The result is the ability to handle all enrollment forms, whether mailed, faxed, or scanned and sent to SDS. All information is ultimately delivered to the client in and EDI format, able to be quickly processed, analyzed, and archived.

The benefits a streamlined enrollment process can provide are many and include: eliminating the direct labor costs associated with data entry of enrollment data; eliminating errors associated with manual entry of enrollment data; creating address standardization to reduce ID care problems; lowering of the lead time associated with loading of enrollment data; and providing additional workflow streamlining and data validation throughout the enrollment process.