New Bedford Corp. finds way to automate data entry and save money

January, 08 2015

 

 

With the Open Enrollment Period for the National Healthcare Marketplace underway, healthcare services providers are preparing for the next wave of medical data stemming from millions more newly-covered Americans.

Medical billing companies and others bridge the gap between provider and payer, and are likely to see a steady rise in work volume as more people seek and receive paid care in 2015. Richmond, Virginia-based medical services provider, New Bedford Corporation, is one who employs the automation technology Foxtrot to cut the time and cost of handling patient billing information and save about $70,000 per year in overhead.Today the company uses Foxtrot software from Orlando, Florida-based EnableSoft to automatically perform this process. “The Affordable Care Act has created more claims and data to maintain for almost every healthcare services provider.” Explained EnableSoft CEO, Richard Milam. “Small and mid-sized organizations really feel the pinch because they likely cannot hire or outsource people to help. Automation technology is a digital employee – an extra pair of hands to help in these situations.”

Like many similar organizations, New Bedford employees review patient records, record, and manually enter data like patient name, location, and treatment into their proprietary billing software. Here, codes are assigned and the records are exported as a Microsoft Excel™ spreadsheet. New Bedford’s previous process called for the exported data to be entered manually into their practice management platform, Intergy. At up to 30 seconds for each of up to 1,000 records daily, employees sometimes needed as many as 8 hours each day to load patient and billing data by hand.

“It was a manual process, but for us, it’s not simply about entering information.” explained Jonathan Ferrell, president of New Bedford. “Sometimes the patient’s demographic information does not exist in our database and we need to request it from the provider. Sometimes we receive duplicate charges, or tracking charges that shouldn’t be billed to insurance at all. There are decisions to be made along the way.” 

Foxtrot now automatically copies patient data from New Bedford’s proprietary billing system and enters it into Intergy at a rate of up to 6 records per minute – a 62 percent time savings versus manual entry – just as if a human were performing the actions themselves. Moreover, Foxtrot works overnight, so employees are free during working hours to build value in other ways. “We can commit more time to other activities like following up with insurance companies for payment. This results in even greater revenue collected on the back end.” says Ferrell.

New Bedford estimates that by automating what would otherwise require two full-time employees to accomplish, they save up to $70,000 per year in employment costs. “If a patient doesn’t exist in our system, we can automatically write an error log. If there is a tracking charge that shouldn’t be billed to insurance, for example, Foxtrot marks that charge accordingly in the system.” continued Ferrell. “Our software reacts when a problem is caught. We call that intelligent data entry.”

About New Bedford Corporation
New Bedford provides Practice Management, Billing, Coding, EMR Auditing, Provider Enrollment, and other services to healthcare providers throughout the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. Their mission is to develop long-lasting business relationships with healthcare providers by developing high-quality back office services in ways that adhere to their core company values.

About EnableSoft
EnableSoft develops and markets Foxtrot; software that automates processes inside of Excel, websites, accounting software, and most other business applications. Over 500 organizations use Foxtrot to perform work that until today, would only be performed manually by human employees. These companies are able to better-allocate their human employees to customer service, sales, or product development while their Foxtrot “digital” employees handle the repetitive and routine business tasks of the organization. EnableSoft customers in financial services, healthcare, insurance, law, accounting, and elsewhere use Foxtrot to get more work done without adding headcount, outsourcing, or complex custom programs. Foxtrot handles processes as complex as legal research, and as routine as updating customer information, with speed and accuracy. EnableSoft was founded in 1995 and is based in Orlando, Florida.