How the Healthcare Industry Stands to Benefit from pdfFiller for Enterprise
“There is no comparison to how I was working before,” says Julie Cox, a business manager at North Idaho Lung and Critical Care (NILACC), who implemented pdfFiller to tackle the constant movement of documents needed to successfully run the medical practice.
As experts in pulmonary care with a team of 19, NILACC needed a solution that would streamline how they manage their documents in order to ensure they could focus on their main objective: to provide excellent care to their large patient population in northern Idaho.
pdfFiller for Enterprise does exactly that. It allows healthcare institutions to offload the manual labor weighing medical professionals down by introducing paperless document management to their operations. This means editing and collaborating on PDF documents with individuals across their office, completing documents with signatures, accessing the most up-to-date records on file, and being confident that they are always within HIPAA compliance.
For NILACC, pdfFiller ushered in a new era of efficiency. Through the fully-online solution, the medical professionals and administrative staff had access to edit, create, and manage their documents from anywhere. And most importantly, the practice could be sure that it was not sacrificing the security of their information, especially their patients’ data, at any point in the process.
pdfFiller for Enterprise and the healthcare industry are well-suited for one another. Let’s take a closer look at the pairing, starting with the pdfFiller features that are expediting healthcare institutions’ processes and the HIPAA compliance measures that are keeping their most important data safe.
Table of contents
- pdfFiller for Enterprise: Key features and HIPAA compliance
- Top 5 benefits of introducing paperless workflow in Healthcare
- Streamlining document & team collaboration
- pdfFiller in action: Using the solution in the Healthcare industry
- The bottom line
pdfFiller for Enterprise: Key features and HIPAA compliance
At the highest level, pdfFiller for Enterprise is an end-to-end document management solution for businesses and enterprises that enables users to edit and manage PDF documents and forms online. It helps businesses increase collaboration across departments, improve organizational productivity, and enhance the experience of the customers or patients they are serving.
pdfFiller for Enterprise has two subscription plans, Basic and Premium, and you can find a quick breakdown of each below.
When it comes to the healthcare industry, HIPAA compliance is among the most important considerations when purchasing software. That is why pdfFiller takes HIPAA compliance seriously, so our customers in the medical field don’t have to stress about it.
pdfFiller protects the private health information of patients by using policies, procedures, and infrastructure that aims to ensure the security, authenticity, and reliability of electronic records and signatures.
Here are the pdfFiller tools that help medical institutions maintain HIPAA compliance:
- Signer authentication: Users have a variety of two-factor authentication options to help them verify the identity of their signers.
- Audit trail: pdfFiller creates and maintains a detailed document history that displays all document and users’ account activities, including users’ full names, email and IP addresses, and the timestamps of their document-related activities.
- Encryption: All documents stored in a pdfFiller account are encrypted with the NSA-developed SHA-256 encryption algorithm, which protects data transfers between a user and another person, a user, and a server, and against external access.
- HIPAA-compliant data storage: pdfFiller stores documents in US-based Amazon S3 data centers, which set the industry standard for HIPAA-compliant secure data storage and protection against security breaches.
- Encrypted folders: Users can safeguard access to documents inside their accounts with encrypted folders, which are an additional and customizable layer of protection. They feature a two-factor authentication layer or an additional password that users must enter to open and edit particular documents in their accounts.
- Tamper-proof controls: pdfFiller employs anti-tampering technologies to ensure that users’ documents can not be altered once filled out and signed. These technologies include watermarks and signature stamps.
As the medical industry has made progress in its digital transformation, cyber threats and security concerns have also evolved to threaten data privacy. It has become an industry standard now for HIPAA-covered entities to enter into business associate agreements (BAAs) with external parties who handle any of their electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI).
Medical organizations will enter into a BAA with pdfFiller, ensuring them that pdfFiller will comply with HIPAA and protect ePHI or will otherwise be liable for HIPAA violations. The BAA mandates that breach protocols and a set of security controls and processes are in place, and establishes each party’s responsibilities to help maintain the security of ePHI.
Top 5 benefits of introducing paperless workflow in Healthcare
Streamlining document workflows is equally beneficial for the medical industry, its professionals, and their patients. Take a look at the list of key benefits that pdfFiller can deliver to improve the day-to-day of any medical organization:
1. Streamlined efficiency
Healthcare is a document-heavy industry, and processing those documents quickly and accurately is no small ask. Manually entering and transferring data from pen and paper forms is a common daily task at small practices to large hospitals alike, as is completing multiple forms of documentation for each patient and for administrative purposes in order to keep an organization operational.
Digitizing document workflows within the healthcare space by filling out and editing PDFs digitally and easily moving them between medical professionals, administrators, and patients, significantly reducing the time required to complete these processes.
2. Less time spent on paperwork, more time focusing on patients
Medical professionals don’t go into medicine for the paperwork, yet they are spending, on average, over 15 hours per week on paperwork and administrative tasks, according to the Medscape Physician Compensation Report of 2022. In 2017, Medscape reported an average of 10 hours per week, showing that time spent on these tasks continues to trend upwards.
When the repetitive and laborious document creation, completion and circulation within a medical workflow is delegated to an enterprise-grade platform like pdfFiller, doctors, administrators, and other medical professionals can devote more time and attention to what matters—their patients and their care.
3. Organized and HIPAA-compliant storage
With so many documents circulating and needing to be filed, pdfFiller’s storage makes organizing documents in folders and access them in a matter of seconds simple. Doctors, administrators, and staff can access the most up-to-date documents they need from anywhere with pdfFiller.
And just because they can access documents from anywhere does not mean they are stored unsafely. pdfFiller stores documents in HIPAA-approved, US-based Amazon S3 data centers and gives users the option of setting up encrypted folders for added protection. Additionally, once a document is completed and signed, it is no longer available for editing. These measures ensure that completed documents cannot be tampered with and can only be accessed by those with permission, following HIPAA regulations.
4. Relief for healthcare workers
The pandemic’s strain on the medical industry has had a tremendous impact on the physical and mental health of medical professionals. Two years after the beginning of the pandemic, medical organizations are still understaffed and their employees overworked.
While pdfFiller cannot solve every challenge faced by medical professionals today, it can make their lives a little easier. The document management available through pdfFiller enhances and simplifies the routine processes that healthcare workers have to handle on a daily basis, freeing up their precious time.
5. Reduced chance of error
Medical errors alone cost around $20 billion annually and have consequences that range from hours spent trying to locate a transcription error to a patient’s death. The risk to a patient’s health as a result of an error is reason enough for the medical industry to develop processes and seek out tools to reduce the likelihood that a patient may be harmed as they are seeking care.
Digitizing document workflows within the healthcare space by filling out and editing PDFs digitally can eliminate document-related errors. With the right digital solution for document management, human mistakes cease to be burdens for medical organizations.
Streamlining document and team collaboration
Medical institutions are collaboration hubs, and that applies to their staff’s work with documents. There are many instances in which multiple people at a single organization need to craft, edit, approve and sign a single PDF document in order for it to be complete. pdfFiller for Enterprise has a range of capabilities that allow teams to tackle documents together and do so quickly and efficiently.
Let’s say an optometry practice wanted to update its employee handbook, including creating an acknowledgment form for each new employee to sign. Without a central location to collaborate on a document, and without the right tools, this process would take the healthcare professionals involved weeks to complete it. But with the tools offered by pdfFiller for Enterprise, the practice could significantly expedite and streamline their work. Here are the key tools pdfFiller for Enterprise offers that are designed to improve team collaboration across any medical institution.
- Document access & shared folders. A healthcare professional can create shared folders that give multiple people access to the documents within them. Additionally, they can share access to any individual document they are working on with other users. This means people on a team or across an organization can easily collaborate on documents at any given time. When giving access to documents, a user can give each collaborator different access levels (to edit, view, or sign) based on their role in the process and for added security.
- Leaving comments. Healthcare professionals have the ability to communicate with each other in a document by leaving comments or adding sticky notes. Users can highlight a text and add a comment that will be attached to it. Others can then reply to the comments and go back and forth in conversation until the issue is resolved. With the sticky note feature, a user can add comments via a sticky note anywhere within the document for others to see.
- Seeing all versions. Just because changes have been made to a document doesn’t mean a healthcare professional can’t access past versions of it. Every time a user exits a document and selects “Done,” the latest “version” of the document is captured. Document collaborators can see the list of versions saved by any collaborator for each document and have the option to either revert the document back to a particular version or access it for reference at any point.
- Working from anywhere. pdfFiller for Enterprise is a cloud-based solution, which means medical professionals can use the solution anywhere, as long as they have an internet connection. Moreover, they can also edit PDFs and collaborate with colleagues on desktop or mobile devices. This means a user has a lot of flexibility to decide when and where they want to access and contribute to a document, which only expedites the collaboration process.
pdfFiller in action: Using the solution in the Healthcare industry
Medical institutions—from specialized private practices to larger hospitals—use pdfFiller to handle their documents electronically. What does that look like exactly? The use of pdfFiller is ranging. Here are a few examples:
1. Patient intake forms
Intake forms, the standard documents patients have to fill out ahead of a medical appointment, are tedious for patients and medical staff alike. They are most often filled out by hand by a patient, and then medical staff must decipher and reenter the collected information into a digital system. This process is long and leaves medical organizations vulnerable to error.
With pdfFiller, medical organizations can create electronic forms for their patients to fill out online and reduce the time it takes to process the completed forms by at least 50%. The steps for completing these forms are simple: medical staff create or upload a form to pdfFiller, make specific fields fillable, and then distribute the link to the forms to their patients, who can complete and sign them from anywhere and on any device.
Every step, including how the document is stored, is HIPAA compliant, so medical organizations and their patients need not worry about this data is accessible to anyone beyond the approved parties.
2. Managing contracts at the big hospital
While medical documents with ePHI make up a significant amount of the paperwork being created, circulated, and completed by medical organizations, there are many other operational pieces to running such an organization that requires documentation as well. For example, contracts.
Hospitals must manage many different types of contracts, including physician recruitment and employment contracts, management service agreements, patient transfer agreements, and technology licensing, and pdfFiller is there to streamline these complicated document processes.
One 700+ bed hospital uses pdfFiller to manage its many legal contracts. Between having hundreds of users managing and involved in the completion of different contracts from across the organization, pdfFiller allows them to simplify the complex process of putting together legal contracts. This includes compiling the necessary documents, making edits, adding signatures, and sending the contracts out to be signed by others.
3. Contractor paperwork and doctor credentialing
Smaller specialized medical practices also have plenty of operations-related documentation to complete.
Hope Discovery ABA Services, a practice that specializes in behavioral therapy, uses pdfFiller to tackle the weekly paperwork needed for their contractors. Their lead behavior analyst, Scott Horton, was looking for a solution that would allow him to edit and complete PDFs online and give him back the time he spent each week searching for fillable PDFs online. After finding pdfFiller, he never looked back.
“Basically, pdfFiller offered a solution for [almost] any situation I was in,” says Horton. “I would, and I do recommend it.”
For NILACC, the impetus for finding pdfFiller was the need to better manage documents for doctor credentialing. Their business manager, Julie Cox, explains that the practice had formerly relied on pen and paper to complete all their documents which “took way too much time and was hard to keep track of.”
pdfFiller, which Cox described as the “most user-friendly” solution she tried, allowed NILACC to move away from pen and paper processes by giving them the gift of an online solution with the ability to add fillable fields to any PDF document they need to run their practice.
What can we conclude about pdfFiller for Enterprise for Healthcare?
pdfFiller is the fastest way to edit, send and sign documents. Not to mention it is easy to learn and introduces simplicity and efficiency to any document process.
For the healthcare industry, which is drowning in paperwork by nature of its work, pdfFiller for Enterprise is a game changer. It allows medical organizations to move away from manual and repetitive document processes by digitizing the creation, editing, sending, completion and signing of documents. The efficiency introduced by pdfFiller saves these increasingly resource-constrained organizations both time and money.
And most importantly, pdfFiller for Enterprise is ready to keep any medical organization HIPAA compliant. Through tools like signer authentication, Audit Trail, encryption, and secure data storage, pdfFiller ensures patient data is safe. This means medical organizations can focus on improving their processes and, in turn, have the space to offer their patients the best care possible.