The significance of healthcare in a society or a country has been explained well in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the outbreak till today, mankind has survived the test of time owing to the relentless efforts of the torchbearers of this sector. But were they fully equipped to face the wrath unleashed over the past few months? While we might keep scrambling for answers, the need of the hour is to foresee any future crisis and prepare ourselves beforehand for the worst of eventualities.

The road to achieving the aforementioned feat goes via bolstering the systems to increase the efficiency of healthcare. And one significant move can be made in this regard by going paperless. The end results of adopting smart document solutions for a healthcare provider would be saving on time as well as expense, whereas it would ultimately benefit all stakeholders – patients, doctors, staff, management – immensely on a personal basis.

Insurance

Insurance settlement is one of the most cumbersome non-health-related tasks that almost every patient has to go through. Going paperless can eradicate this frictional process without much ado. With smart document solutions in place, a patient who is admitted to a hospital need not worry about the insurance formalities as necessary documents and reports can be redirected automatically to the insurance companies. While the intermediary channel is not required, it streamlines the overall process of approval and payment. For instance, hospitals can integrate Web Forms for the whole process wherein all necessary information of the patients can be made available in one document, which could be further converted into a PDF for easy access.

Furthermore, all these documents can be securely stored with tamper-proof seal on a cloud server and can be downloaded by hospitals or insurance companies at their disposal.

Admission

Admission to a hospital can be a very tiring experience. At first one needs to spend long hours waiting for bed availability, following which begins the rigorous paper-based process of admission. Some of the most common formalities are filling of forms, identity verification, scanning of necessary documents and print of receipts. Almost all these processes and long waiting hours can be eliminated in one go with the adaptation of smart document solutions.

While the web forms can be filled on the customer’s mobile phone while waiting for availability, all necessary documents like ID proof, prescription etc can be accessed digitally without the conventional scan-print-scan mechanism. It’s important to mention here that overall bed turnaround time also improves drastically by going paperless.

Discharge summary

Many of us might have faced instances when the doctor advised a discharge in the morning but it was evening by the time we finally set our foot back home. The factors behind this unwanted delay are quite a few, including the insurance process and approvals of doctors at different levels. Smart document and eSignature solutions enable doctors to edit, review or approve discharge summary of patients from the comfort of their mobile phones or laptops. Also, different forms of signatures like Electronic, Digital, Hybrid etc can be used for different objectives.

The aforementioned facts manifest that document digitisation has the potential to overhaul or revamp the face of healthcare, especially in India. The pandemic has made technology indispensable, and now the onus is on us to make the best use of it for the upliftment and betterment of mankind.