Salesforce has announced that it will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) for machine learning document automation in its healthcare cloud offering.

The new technology for healthcare and life sciences organization will increase digitization in management processes and minimize administrative burdens, reduce potential costly errors, and improve the overall patient experience, the company said.

The technology product, called Intelligent Document Automation (IDA), is designed for use with another new Salesforce tool called the Intelligence Form Reader, powered by Amazon Textract. 

The Intelligence Form Reader taps into optical character recognition (OCR) to help increase accuracy of health document workflows, from processing patient referrals to patient services program enrollment, all on one platform.

Amit Khanna, VP of Health Cloud at Salesforce, said, “The healthcare and life sciences industries continue to rely largely on legacy systems as well as faxes and paper documents to manage patient records and communication such as enrolling patients in care programs, patient referrals and intake. With that comes a set of operational challenges, such as receiving documents across multiple channels and manually entering and re-entering information into disparate applications like PDF editors and electronic health records.

“This often makes it difficult to find the right document for the right patient when it is needed quickly. This can also make day-to-day business processes, such as enrolling patients in a care program, managing the patient referral and intake processes, or verifying prior patient authorizations, disjointed and time-consuming. When inefficiencies like these occur, they can lead to potential patient care risks, lost revenue and a frustrating experience for employees and patients.“

Healthcare and life science organization personnel will be able to receive, process and track all patient and plan member forms in one place, eliminating the need to toggle back and forth from multiple screens. For example, 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. 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.

https://www.salesforce.com/products/health-cloud/overview/