Industry Vertical: Healthcare

Challenge

The healthcare industry is undergoing dramatic changes worldwide. With increasing regulation and stricter cost containment policies, healthcare and insurance companies are being pushed to streamline and modernize business process, manage information overload and introduce tighter controls for patient privacy.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which came into force in 2009 is key driver in the move towards modernization. This act stipulates that healthcare institutions adopt Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and modernize IT infrastructures. To this effect, the UK, for example, is aiming to have all NHS medical records digitized by 2015.

Across the industry, stakeholders are driving to streamline their business processes and reduce operational costs. Insurance companies and Healthcare Payers are fighting to combat the cost of reimbursement. Healthcare Providers need to deliver accurate and timely information to authorized caregivers and researchers to expedite patient care diagnosis and treatment. They also are striving to enhance their medical knowledge, improve clinical workflow, and increase productivity to speed time to treatment. Life Sciences and Medical Research seek to accelerate research collaboration and information flows from discovery through clinical trials, drug approval, and product launch – safeguarding intellectual property while meeting global regulations. By streamlining business processes, and improving knowledge management and collaboration, R&D efforts are dramatically enhanced. In addition, healthcare organizations can avoid the legal and financial penalties resulting from data breach and misuse.

Another big shift in the field of healthcare is enhancing patient communications. Autonomy's unique meaning-based technology is revolutionizing the healthcare industry with the ability to understand all unstructured information – including calls, digital images, emails, and more – which brings automation to the digitization, classification, process and retrieval of all patient information and communications.

• "Autonomy is critical for us as we work to deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right people. Our Strategy and Business Development teams generate and handle vast amounts of information on a continual basis." - Jim Harrison, Vice President of Business Intelligence at Sutter Health
• "We are always looking for new ways to improve our patient care and having the right technology is very important., Autonomy's innovative software will help eliminate the potential risks within the prescription process by proactively sending alerts to medical staff without the need to perform manual searches or checks. This will help our doctors and pharmacists to work more efficiently." - Francisco Luis Cáceres, Coordinator of SES "JARA" project
• "While currently most investigative questions are resolved by examining what has happened, we will be using Autonomy to know what is happening or predict what might happen in the future. This means that we will have the latest medical information readily available. Autonomy IDOL will help us deliver the best medical service to our patients." - Luis Larraya Galarza, Director del Complejo Médico Tecnológico de Navarra at Osasunbidea

Solution Description

Information Access

Autonomy's unique meaning-based technology enables medical experts to accelerate research collaboration, and significantly enhance patient service and communications.

Autonomy's core infrastructure software, the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), can extract meaning from patient-doctor communications, clinical trials, medical research and a plethora of others. The product delivers alert notifications to medical experts whenever a notable event occurs, such as when important new content is posted online, a growing number of the same product praise or complaint is detected online or in the contact center, or inaccurate information is disseminated to a large audience. By having a real-time pulse on activity across a broad range of channels, healthcare professionals can deliver better service more efficiently.

IDOL also automatically stores an accurate and multifaceted understanding of every patient, based on powerful profiling operations. This ability enables IDOL to automatically match patients with similar interests and uncover communities of knowledge. Summaries for each patient can be generated that relate to the context of a healthcare provider's or insurance company's original inquiry – allowing the most applicable dynamic report to be provided for a given situation. Autonomy's enterprise search capabilities automate the retrieval, processing, and management of information across any size organization.

IDOL is connected to over 400 content repositories and supports over 1,000 file formats, uniquely able to aggregate and index any form of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data into a single index, regardless of where the file resides. Not only does this include all popular word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation formats, but is able to bring meaning to medical files such as Dicom.

Business Process Management

Autonomy's intelligent BPM solution is able to streamline business processes such as invoice processing, claims processing and access to customer information. It combats the growing cost of reimbursement processes through improved data accuracy and enhances records management to facilitate compliance. Autonomy removes the manual need to fill out paper work, and then enter in the data manually. Healthcare providers are able to store all old information into a database through using Cardiff's LiquidOffice suite of products. LiquidOffice eForms provide a rich same-as-paper experience online. This saves cost and eliminates the time spent on paper processing, filing, and data storage.

Urgency is critical to the healthcare industry. Autonomy's BPM solution provides automatic routing of electronic documents, coupled with electronic workflow, moving documents quickly to employee work queues. This process, which often used to require an overnight turnaround, has been reduced to just a few hours. LiquidOffice automates all aspects of both paper-based and web-based document-centric business processes, delivers significant cost reduction, accelerated processes and an improved customer experience.

Records Management, eDiscovery and Archiving

Digital healthcare brings the promise of significant improvements in the speed and effectiveness of patient care and reduced errors and costs among others. However, according to the latest statistics from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, only 0.5% of US hospitals currently have a complete EMR (electronic medical record) to provide consistency and continuity across medical records, conditions and patients.

Autonomy's Records Management solution supports many key healthcare related activities by ensuring that patient information is efficiently controlled and is discoverable and quickly accessible. Records Management ensures that controlled information is only accessible to those with the right of access and that it is retained according to corporate and legislative rules after which it is appropriately disposed of. Autonomy delivers the most robust Archiving solutions either on premise, or as a hosted, cloud-based offering.

Healthcare professionals benefit from a single, centralized view of all records, meaning-based retrieval and processing, mapped security with multiple simultaneous logins, seamless integration with existing hospital systems, as well as automated Compliance and Information Governance.

Patient Privacy Protection

Data privacy is an immense issue that continues to grow as individuals increasingly exchange personal and financial information with companies through various channels. Information collected and held within the enterprise is constantly at risk of being compromised, and watchdogs continue to report increases in insider theft and data leaks.

Autonomy Interaction Control Element (ICE) monitors server, desktop, and system events and forms a conceptual understanding of employee activity, whether they are speaking with a patient or accessing an application. A combination of policy-based triggers and intelligent Meaning Based Computing technology allows ICE to identify any fraudulent or suspicious activities taking place within the organization

Customer Interaction Solutions

More than ever, patients communicate with their doctors through multiple channels: email, phone calls, videos and instant messaging, creating an overload of information and prompting the need for the adoption of next-generation solutions capable of extracting meaning and value from this “human-friendly” information. Only Autonomy can help healthcare providers link these channels of communication to discover, monitor, analyze, classify and secure information to provide the highest level of patient services possible.

Case Studies

Vanderbilt University Medical Center Implements Email Archiving Software to Optimize Storage Management

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) is a multi-location healthcare facility in Nashville, Tennessee, providing comprehensive healthcare to the community with the focus on innovation in patient care and physician and nurse education. VUMC is a leader in medical education, research, and patient care in the Southeast.

In 2002, the IT department at VUMC migrated from Lotus Notes to MS Exchange, and for the two year period following this migration, the healthcare network experienced exponential email storage growth. Quotas were quickly overrun and large mailboxes caused stability problems within the email system. The IT department started to look into email archiving software as a way to offload the servers and restore stability to the messaging environment.

VUMC chose Autonomy for its archiving platform. Based on VUMC research, Autonomy's Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) software was the most cost-effective solution for the medical center. As a result of the Autonomy implementation, VUMC is able to better manage its email storage growth and improve disk storage management and systems stability within its messaging environment. Email became more manageable cutting it from an 8% growth rate to 1% per month. The IT department believes that without Autonomy EAS, the size of VUMC's email storage would have prevented it from successfully completing full backups during its allotted backup window.

Bruno Independent Living Aids

Bruno Independent Living Aids is a durable medical equipment manufacturer that receives 300 work orders per day for custom products. Initially Bruno managed this work order process by manually routing orders through the organization, causing delays and stress on the production team. The issue was identified and a plan was put in place to resolve the slow down. The plan encompassed meeting quality control demands by pursuing ISO 9001 certification. ISO standards contribute to making the development, manufacturing and supply of products and services more efficient, safer and cleaner. The requirement for ISO certification is that documents have to be controlled, meaning Bruno had to track the routing of the documents, signatures and date stamps confirming all orders were processed through the appropriate channels and approvals. Bruno also realizes it is time to eliminate the manual process and implement an automated solution across the organization.

To eliminate the manual paper-based processes Bruno selected Autonomy Cardiff's intelligent document management repository, transforming Bruno's paper audit trail into an electronic workflow solution. A web-based solution, Autonomy enables Bruno's employees to use a standard Internet Browser to automatically route, track and approve the more than 300 work orders received daily at every stage of the sign-off and procurement process across Bruno's three locations. Autonomy facilitates the transfer of electronic forms and documents through the different approval steps and retains electronic signatures and dates of approval.

As a result, by automating the sales order process, Bruno has reduced its average order processing time from eight to under two hours, enabling them to get orders to the shop floor and fulfill orders more quickly. Bruno is also using Cardiff LiquidOffice to develop intelligent electronic forms, which have already increased operating efficiency from product order to delivery by threefold. Bruno has improved its accuracy and tripled sales orders processing efficiency, offering the company far more than just a 6 hour reduction in processing. Bruno Independent Living Aides

Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente is the largest non-profit health plan in the US, providing healthcare for more than 60 years. Kaiser Permanente is known for its strong social purpose, physicians' responsibility for clinical care, and an enduring cooperation between its health plan and medical groups. However, they do face business challenges.

Northern California Kaiser members rely extensively on the NCAL pharmacy call center. The contact center frequently handles prescription orders, which means agents typically interact with ailing, frustrated, or elderly members that require specialized attention. A phone survey, manually conducted by another department, found the satisfaction rating of members calling into the contact center was 89% out of 100. However, the phone survey only resulted in a response from only 300 out of the 1500 members. And because members were called days after the initial interaction, they were less likely to participate and, if they did, they were less likely to accurately rate the service of that specific interaction. This type of survey results in a small sample size and inaccurate results. The contact center also faced challenges: Managers required a more accurate way to measure service and efficient method of implementing training to their agents to raise member satisfaction scores.

The NCAL Pharmacy Call Center implemented Autonomy etalk Qfiniti Survey to gain a more accurate and comprehensive view of its service delivery. Qfiniti Survey provided an automated post-call satisfaction survey in which the results were directly linked to call recordings and specific agents.

The NCAL Pharmacy Call Center has been using Autonomy etalk's Qfiniti Expert since 2005 to train agents on new procedures and processes. After the implementation of Qfiniti Survey, the contact center found another use for Qfiniti Expert that directly affected member service scores. The survey revealed that agents in the contact center needed training on having more effective and empathic interactions with a specific group of Kaiser Permanente members. By using Qfiniti Experts jointly with Qfiniti survey, the NCAL pharmacy call center improved member satisfaction. Autonomy etalk Case Study on Kaiser Permanente