Automated assignment of healthcare documents

At VitalAire, a Hamburg service provider in the healthcare sector, all incoming documents are processed automatically using the tangro DoC solution – easily, quickly and efficiently. Need something to stop you snoring? VitalAire has what you’re looking for. Medical prescriptions, delivery notes from the oxygen suppliers, patient correspondence and all the communication between VitalAire and the health insurance companies  - altogether around 2,500 documents with some 3,500 pages that are processed in SAP with tangro. This means are sorted by document type, scanned and have their content entered in SAP.

The intuitive operation of tangro DoC was one of the reasons why VitalAire went for the tangro solution. Another reason was the solution’s particular flexibility, which enabled the system to be adapted perfectly to the requirements of the Hamburg service provider. “The tangro solution is designed to be so flexible that our requirements were able to be fully implemented. That goes for the processes, on the one hand, which were mapped exactly as we require them in the company, and the user interface on the other hand. It’s designed in a really simple way, just as we requested,” says Julian Klaus, IT expert at VitalAire. He also cites tangro DoC’s embedding in SAP as a further reason for the decision.

The time needed for the entire process, from scanning, through recognition, to entry in SAP, has been cut by 20 percent and now takes just two minutes on average. There used to be bottlenecks, especially at around nine in the morning when all eight branches started incoming processing at the same time, which caused very long throughput times. In some cases, processing even took up to three hours, as the old OCR system was unable to cope and a large document could block the entire procedure. Today the OCR server is fed in parallel, so that even large documents are no longer a problem. The SAP add-on exhibits another significant acceleration when searching for parked documents: tangro DoC is five times faster here.

This is down to the special structure in tangro, in which all incoming data, i.e. the text file and image, is stored temporarily in the receipt journal as a buffer. So users don’t need to search the depths of the SAP archive for certain documents, but can access the much more streamlined receipt journal, which is also available when the SAP archive is not active. In this way, users get a complete overview of the current documents and their processing status at any time. All documents that can’t be posted directly via the VitalAire bar code arrive in the tangro receipt journal. The primary content recognised is the policyholder number, date of birth and postcode, enabling automated assignment to the patient.