Salesforce on Wednesday announced the release of an Intelligent Document Automation tool aimed at allowing healthcare and life sciences companies to digitize document-management processes.   

The tool, which can be used in combination with the company's Amazon Web Services Textract-powered Intelligent Form Reader, is designed to increase the efficiency and accuracy of health-document workflows. 

WHY IT MATTERS  

The company noted that legacy systems such as paper and fax documents can lead to operational challenges, including having to manually enter information into electronic health records.

IDA for Health Cloud is intended to simplify the document-management process, said Salesforce.   

According to the company, the new tool can help provider, payer, pharmaceutical and medical-device organizations:  

• Unify the end-to-end document life cycle on a single platform.
• Streamline document intake with intelligent routing.
• Allow customers to apply a preconfigured checklist of items to received documents.
• Reduce manual data entry.

"An intake coordinator at a home health agency can log into Health Cloud to pull a patient-referral form from their queue, edit or remove any irrelevant or unnecessary pages, attach the document to the right patient record and confirm relevant patient data was automatically populated to the appropriate fields in Health Cloud," explained Salesforce VP of Health Cloud Amit Khanna in a blog post accompanying the announcement.

"Later, not only can the intake coordinator reference the document, but if any of the patient data extracted from the form or document is incorrect, the intake coordinator is also able to edit and update the field if needed," Khanna added.  

The company highlighted Nizhoni Health, a Massachusetts-based home healthcare agency, as an example of the way healthcare organizations can leverage intelligent documentation automation.  

"Nizhoni Health will start to roll out IDA to help its staff intelligently assign incoming referral documents from different sources, like fax and email, to patient records in Salesforce. IDA capabilities will be deployed to help Nizhoni improve manual processing and deliver the right home healthcare to the right patients, faster," said Khanna. 

THE LARGER TREND  

The IDA tool joins a suite of other Health Cloud services offered by Salesforce, including care collaboration features, social determinants of health capabilities and provider relationship management tools.  

The IT giant has also been tapped by healthcare organizations to launch their own platforms, including Humana in 2020.   

"We are thrilled to partner with Humana to power its digital transformation and connect the healthcare ecosystem across members, providers and caregivers," said Dr. Ashwini Zenooz, the chief medical officer and SVP of healthcare and life sciences at Salesforce, in a statement at the time.

ON THE RECORD  

"With the new Health Cloud Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) capabilities, Salesforce is advancing its vision to help customers simplify patient care and engagement, work together more efficiently, and build one-to-one relationships across the entire health journey," said Khanna.

Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Twitter: @kjercich
Email: kjercich@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.