ADURO’s wellness programs improve the health of staff in hundreds of companies every year. But error-prone manual entry of faxed physician forms into ADURO’s database cost far too much time. And as business grew fast, bottlenecks and backlogs were inevitable. Until ADURO automated form capture with ABBYY FlexiCapture®.
Founded as “Worksite Wellness” in 2001 by four like-minded doctors, ADURO is guided by a passion for nurturing people and their potential for wellbeing – rather than taking a problem-oriented focus. This health-positive approach is supported by a platform that integrates wellness assessment, one-on-one coaching and incentive programs that reward healthy behaviors and good results.
“When we started,” explains cofounder and Salesforce Administrator Dr. Mark Thompson, “we concentrated on onsite programs including biometric testing, health coaching, seminars and workshops. In 2007, we expanded our programs to an online platform, making them more fun and social. Each employee has their own account, can login to participate in events like walking challenges, check the points they’ve earned towards rewards and communicate with their coach.”
A key element of ADURO’s wellness program platform, biometric testing, required the manual processing of physician fax forms. But even with staff working 10-hour days, those forms were stacking up. “It’s vital to get that information into our database so employees can get on with their programs, get their awards and work with their coaches,” says Thompson. “We had to reclaim lost efficiency and maintain excellent service for clients’ employees.”
Biometric testing measures markers such as body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and glucose levels. It can be performed at labs, or by ADURO technicians during clients’ onsite wellness events. But as Thompson says, many companies prefer that employees use their personal physicians to do the tests: “There’s a lot less administration and cost involved for employer groups and us.”
The process begins when employees provide their physicians with a form downloaded from ADURO. Each form is tailored to its client and features a combination of bubbles and handwriting – and when completed by a physician, is faxed to ADURO for processing. But rapidly expanding business meant physician fax forms were arriving faster, too. “Until a year and a half ago,” says Thompson, “the data from physician fax forms was manually typed into our database. Then they really started stacking up and it became unmanageable to deal with straight up faxes. We needed to find a solution fast.”
Given the volumes of forms, hiring more staff simply wasn’t cost effective.
Thompson contacted ABBYY, who put him in direct contact with Paperless Productivity Inc., a partner with extensive experience in providing data capture solutions to healthcare organizations. “We specialize in fax for healthcare,” says Shamel Naguib, President, “Working with Dr. Thompson and his team, we integrated FlexiCapture into their workflow within two weeks.”
With the new workflow, incoming faxes are routed to a HIPAA compliant online fax service that automatically assigns them to the appropriate customer folder on a server. From there, the physician fax forms are loaded on to either of two workstations set up with FlexiCapture. The software recognizes and captures the forms’ data (a mix of bubble and hand printed information). The data is then verified, converted to a CSV file and uploaded into ADURO’s proprietary Ignite database – and pulled from there into the company’s Salesforce CRM solution.
And as for installation? According to Naguib, it went smoothly. “Pretty much without a hiccup,” as Naguib recalls. And as Thompson says, the impact on workflow was positive from the start. “Within the first three months we successfully processed five thousand physician fax forms.”
As business expands and use of physician fax forms continues to grow in popularity, FlexiCapture’s role at ADURO becomes more important. “FlexiCapture is really helping,” says Thompson. “Given the number of forms that are coming in, we’d have to devote far more staff to data entry without it.”
Today, just one person now handles a workload that has increased to four thousand forms a month – and in great part thanks to FlexiCapture’s accuracy. According to Dr. Thompson, verification takes a lot less time – remarkable given the poor quality of many of the faxed forms ADURO receives. “One person is now able to process three to four times as many documents than before,” he says.
And for the future, Dr. Thompson is looking forward to even better results: “Prior to FlexiCapture, processing a form took close to six minutes and that was under ideal conditions. Now we’re aiming for a minute and a half. We’re not quite there yet. But we’re getting there.”
