EOB processing at Sonora Quest Laboratories

Sonora Quest Laboratories, Tempe, AZ - USA

The client's view

“In light of Sonora Quest Laboratories high standards and expectations, Paradatec’s technology has met our expectations. It has helped position us for the future, by providing us with increased receivables availability, a reduced paper backlog, and a dramatically more efficient process.” Kathleen Strunk, Billing Manager, Sonora Quest Laboratories

Sonora Quest Laboratories, a joint venture between Banner Health and Quest Diagnostics, is the nation’s largest integrated laboratory system with over 2,000 employees serving more than 6 million patients annually throughout Arizona.

Project Description

Sonora Quest Laboratories required integration of the Paradatec automated EOB capture solution into their current Freedom Imaging Systems enterprise content management solution RICAR and their revenue cycle management solution.

“We had used OCR to capture EOB data in the past. Due to outsourcing and validation issues we were very skeptical about OCR.” says Cindy Brouwer (Supervisor of Cash Applications, Sonora Quest Laboratories), “So we asked the Freedom and Paradatec team to perform a brief proof of concept by running some of our most common paper EOBs through their process in order to make sure the results we had heard about would also be realized with our own documents. Our skepticism began to disappear once we saw the results of the proof of concept demonstration. Paradatec also afforded us the solution to keep the validation process in house.”

Outcome

The project was completed and is currently in production. EOB header, footer and line item claim details are all captured more accurately, faster and with a fraction of the labor formerly required. To ensure extreme accuracy, sophisticated business rules and balancing calculations have been implemented at the EOB, claim, and line item total levels. Across all selected incoming EOB documents requiring complex line item capture, the system is able to achieve over 85% automation (data from benchmark results from 15.3 million fields captured). This has allowed Sonora Quest Laboratories to position itself for an anticipated future increase in incoming document volume. Today Sonora Quest Laboratories no longer has a backlog of paper EOBs, and their revenue posting management process is more efficient. In addition, they are doing all this with approximately 80% less production time than was formerly required.

Further Information

You can download the complete case study here: Sonora Quest Case Study (PDF, 260kB)