Augusta Health Deploys Forward Advantage AI to Tackle Paper Mountain
“We needed a really slick process,” Leigh Williams, CIO at Augusta Health, recalled of the mountain of incoming paperwork facing her staff.
To eliminate a tedious paper bottleneck, Augusta Health has deployed an artificial intelligence-based document recognition and routing solution from Forward Advantage, healthcareittoday.com reported. The community health system in central Virginia, which includes a 255-bed hospital and four urgent care clinics, handles 750,000 paper documents every year. That volume translates to roughly 2.4 million pages submitted via scanning or faxing.
Replacing Manual Sorting With Automated Workflows
Before implementing the new Forward Advantage software, Augusta Health relied on human agents to manually sort incoming files. Each document appeared on a screen for an agent to inspect, determine its category, decide where it should be stored, and route it to the correct clinician for action. While faster than physical paper sorting, the manual review still introduced delays into patient treatment and billing operations.
Augusta Health and Forward Advantage share a working relationship dating back to 1999. When Forward Advantage introduced AI-driven categorizations designed to automate the identification, storage, and routing of incoming medical records, extending that long-standing partnership became a logical step for the health system.
Targeting Structured Processes With Human Oversight
Audrey Brislin, Vice President of Product and Marketing at Forward Advantage, noted that the core of successful automation lies in understanding a provider’s existing workflows. Because some workflows remain more consistent and predictable than others, automation should target those structured processes first. The software is engineered to keep a human in the loop, ensuring oversight where workflows vary.
Augusta Health Tracks Labor Costs and Document Turnaround
Having deployed the AI automation tool for several months, Augusta Health leaders describe it as an effective remedy for a long-standing, intractable operational problem. The health system is actively tracking success metrics centered on labor costs and the turnaround time required to deliver documents to clinicians for action. Clinicians have welcomed the faster delivery of documents directly into their native MEDITECH workflows.
Extracting Deeper Analytics From Centralized Data
Williams noted that eliminating manual document categorization helps improve staff retention. Sorting paperwork by hand offered little professional fulfillment or value-add for employees. Centralizing the categorization process alongside automation also positions Augusta Health to run deeper analytics, extracting insights regarding the origin points of incoming prescriptions and patient referrals.
