Making paper claims quicker

More than 2 million paper claims end up at Medical Schemes and Administrators monthly. These require manual or part manual processing. Many electronically submitted claims are submitted as paper creating considerable duplicate effort in the Medical Scheme system.

The mosaic used in this case includes all the relevant information about the claim in a standard format, as agreed by the major administrators in the industry and approved by the Board of Healthcare Funders.

It is common cause in this day and age that paper documents can be tampered with to represent something different from the original. The mosaic is tamperproof and is always decoded into the original. Intelleca Datacode allows for creating "digital data" (binary data) in a paper format that can be physically transmitted without any data being lost, corrupted, tampered or viewed by unauthorized entities. In addition, any information encoded can be decoded into the exact format it was encoded in.

Intelleca Datacode incorporates INTACTA.CODE which is fully multimedia compatible. Any type of information that can normally be stored on a computer, including voice, music, executable codes, photos, video clips, biometrics, signals, etc. can be stored in mosaic format. The mosaic is so robust that it can recover 100% of the contents successfully after random destruction of as much as 10-50% of the printed mosaic and withstand up to 25 degrees skewing of the scanned document.

Advantages to Healthcare Providers of Service:

• No additional cost to the service provider
• Automatically incorporated into your Eminance practice management software application
• Allows the Medical Scheme to capture the claim 100% accurately
• Speeds up the processing of medical aid claims for both practice and patient
• The mosaic is tamperproof and resilient to folding
• Allows for more information contained in the mosaic than can be printed on paper

New application to remove the hassle in managing paper medical claims.

Paper claims management is a headache for medical scheme administrators, members and healthcare practitioners alike. Duplication of efforts and human error in manually capturing claims can lead to delays in paying out on claims and payments to practitioners.
But creating a paperless environment is a long way off – for many in the medical sector paper records remain a requirement. How then to cut through the waste in the system while still supporting those who need to keep paper records?

Discovery Health is leading the way in this regard with the introduction of technology provided by Intelleca Datacode, which allows paper claims to be processed electronically by the medical scheme administrator.

According to Discovery’s chief information officer John Robertson, Intelleca Datacode makes the technology (application) available to Practice Management Software Providers, which prints a claim together with a mosaic. The mosaic is a special pattern on the document that contains the full detail of the claim in an encoded and secure format, and which in turn can be scanned and processed electronically by Discovery Health. This allows for 100% accuracy and much faster claims settlement for both members and practitioners because no human intervention is needed.

The mosaic can potentially contain a lot more information than what can be printed on a paper claim simply because you run out of real estate on a piece of paper. Additional information like blood results, blood pressure results and ECG results, or even a voice file, could be included in the mosaic.

The decoding of the mosaic is most effective if a laser printer is used and the paper is not folded or scrunched.

Robertson says Discovery Health has been working with Intelleca Datacode and practice management software providers who service medical practitioners, to integrate Intelleca Datacode into their own software. “The response so far has been good, with the four major practice management software providers signed up. We believe more and more medical practitioners will start to see the benefit of the system soon,” he says.
The system is designed to improve the management of paper claims and Robertson sees no reason why it should not become an industry standard in managing all paper claims.

“Discovery Health has always prided itself as an innovator in the sector, and through this application we believe we can deliver convenience and improved service to healthcare providers and members alike.”.