PharmaCord

Story highlights

About PharmaCord: A patient services company committed to expediting the prescription process, PharmaCord is known for bringing innovative solutions to the complex landscape in healthcare.

Hyland product: Hyland IDP

Integrations: PharmaCord Lynk (proprietary), Hyland OnBase

Major wins:

• Captured 40% time savings, with results improving over time.
• Documents that used to take 25-30 minutes to manually process now take 5 minutes.
• Scalability has eliminated challenges with seasonal fluctuations.
• Following the pilot program, PharmaCord plans to expand Hyland IDP’s use to other enrollment programs

PharmaCord is a patient services company dedicated to simplifying the prescription journey for patients who require specialty medications. With Hyland IDP, PharmaCord was able to expedite and streamline the enrollment process, ensuring patients receive the medications they need without unnecessary delays.

The challenges

As an organization operating in the healthcare space, PharmaCord is no stranger to processing large volumes of documents. Every new prescription enrollment and approval case involves numerous documents being submitted by the patient, doctors, insurance companies and many other organizations.

Manual reviews and data entry of thousands of documents a day

Until now, processing of all these incoming documents was mostly a manual task. Even though the documents came in digitally as email attachments or faxes, they had to be reviewed by an employee, who would then classify and separate them as needed and add keywords and other metadata. With those tasks complete, the employee would then forward the documents for ingestion into Lynk (PharmaCord’s proprietary case management system). There, another user would attach the documents to the correct patient case and perform manual data entry from these documents into PharmaCord’s repository, OnBase.

Part of the challenge with manual processing was the sheer volume of incoming documents. Each enrollment application can require over 30 different types of documents and forms ranging from medical records, prescriptions and lab results, to IDs, income and tax statements, and insurance approvals and preauthorizations. With the process being so document-heavy, it was not uncommon for PharmaCord employees to have to classify and separate 2,000-3,000 documents a day across PharmaCord’s more than 40 prescription programs.

Intake documentation came in a single file of mixed document packets

Another challenge with the incoming documents was they often arrived in mixed document packets scanned into a single file, and considerable effort had to go into separating them and properly classifying the individual documents.

> Read more | What can you do with Hyland IDP?

Considerable seasonal volume spikes

There was also a dramatic recurring seasonal spike in volume during the annual patient re-enrollment period, during which time the processing volume almost doubled. This required PharmaCord to commit additional resources to this already costly process.

Processing errors were unavoidable

Finally, there was also a desire to reduce document processing errors. Given the volume and variety of documents processed every day, even the best human workers could make simple mistakes which could result in rework and delay patients receiving the medications they need.

The solution: Hyland IDP

This is when PharmaCord’s IT department decided to investigate intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions, said Aaron Seamans, PharmaCord’s VP of Information Technology. Already a Hyland customer and using our OnBase ECM solution, the team eventually settled on Hyland IDP, impressed with the solution’s AI learning capabilities.

“The solution’s learning capability was a big consideration,” Seamans said. “We needed a solution that could not only learn different document types but also continuously learn the variations within each type and get better over time. And that’s what Hyland IDP does.”

Hyland IDP enables PharmaCord to accelerate the patient enrollment process by automating document separation, classification, and data extraction and entry into OnBase.

Accelerates document processing

One of the main reasons PharmaCord invested in Hyland IDP was to accelerate document processing time. While the system is still learning, and PharmaCord is conducting manual batch reviews for quality assurance purposes, they have already seen up to 40% time savings in the overall process.

Things will move even faster once the system is fully trained and batch reviews can be omitted.

“Complex documents that used to take 20-30 minutes to process manually, now take around five minutes with Hyland IDP,” Seamans said.

Hyland IDP not only accurately classifies individual documents but also effectively separates mixed document packets.

Scales with the demand

The seasonal fluctuations in volume that before required PharmaCord to add resources to the process are now handled seamlessly. Hyland IDP scales with ease from a few thousand documents to tens of thousands, without slowing down.

Improves employee experience

Even though some users at PharmaCord were initially skeptical of the solution’s ability to handle complex document processing tasks, they are now believers. Not only is Hyland IDP easy to use and manage, but it also unburdens employees from tedious data entry tasks, allowing them more time and energy to dedicate to managing their cases and interfacing with patients.

An impactful change

Because PharmaCord assists patients with obtaining specialty medications, time is always of the essence. The faster all the required documents are added to the system, the faster the approvals process can begin.

“Our patients’ quality of life depends on these medications, and if we can shorten their wait time even just by a few hours, that’s huge,” said Seamans.

PharmaCord’s future with Hyland IDP: More rollouts

PharmaCord’s initial implementation of Hyland IDP targeted only two of their more than 40 different enrollment programs. Now that Hyland IDP has proven itself, the organization plans to begin rolling it out to the other programs.

Seamans and his department are also looking at what else can be automated in the enrollment process, including case creation, CRM integration and more.

“The sky is really the limit in what we can do with it,” he says.