Independent medical evaluators, insurance firms, and attorneys require complete, well-organized, and thoroughly summarized medical records devoid of duplicates to serve their clients promptly and efficiently. Often, they struggle with duplicate records, which makes their work redundant and affects clients’ satisfaction. According to a study by the American Health Information Management Association, a typical hospital has a 10 percentage duplication rate of medical records. As more healthcare facilities implement Electronic Health Records (EHRs), the percentage of duplicate medical records is rapidly increasing.
Also, a recent report states that with the introduction of the revamped Medical-Legal Fee Schedule (MLFS), medical records review costs are skyrocketing. In such circumstances, it is wise to avoid the unnecessary expenses incurred by the attorneys and insurance firms in reviewing duplicate records. Therefore, IMEs, insurance firms, and attorneys seek a technologically efficient deduplication process to mitigate the above challenges.
What is Medical Records Deduplication
Medical records deduplication is a process of identification and removal of redundant and invalid pages such as duplicate reports, other patients’ records, and irrelevant pages from a client’s medical record.
This blog will discuss the factors that make deduplication a compelling process for Independent medical evaluators (IME), attorneys, and insurance companies.
Reduced redundant work for IMEs
Independent medical evaluators go through high volumes of medical records to summarize a medical case that plays a significant role in its proceedings. Unfortunately, almost 30 percentage of records in every case contain duplicate documents, and the evaluator invariably gets stuck reviewing redundant records. Managing duplicates in Independent medical evaluations typically take hours, if not days, of manual work. Therefore, removing such duplicates from a bunch of medical records helps the IMEs to review only the original records and use their time to review more case files productively.
Improved turnaround time for clients
Given the nature of medical records, it takes a considerable amount of time for independent evaluators to review the medical records. However, duplicates complicate the process by forcing the evaluators to spend a long time reviewing a medical record. Therefore, removing duplicate records is essential to ensure IMEs save time screening the same page multiple times. A robust and foolproof deduplication process will help improve operational efficiency and improve turnaround time for the IMEs in reviewing medical records.
Minimized medical record review costs
IMEs usually charge for the number of records they ought to review in a certain medical file. A sizeable 30 percent of duplicates in a given medical file make the insurance companies and attorneys pay for the review of duplicates. This poses a situation that if the medical record contains duplicates, then the insurance companies and attorneys pay a proportional increase in the amount than actually required. Therefore, a foolproof deduplication process ensures the client pays a reasonable cost for the reviewers.
Conclusion
PreludeSys optimizes the process by providing a hybrid solution that leverages automated AI/ML systems and experienced reviewers to tag, sort, and remove duplicate records from a huge volume of medical records. Although many other service providers rely purely on automated or manual systems, neither can approach the accuracy of our hybrid system. To know more about our deduplication services, talk to our experts today.
