eClinicalWorks empowers thousands of practitioners to reduce hours spent on paperwork with Azure AI Document Intelligence

In many healthcare practices and facilities, physicians and staff spend hours each day sorting through paper documentation related to patient health records. This keeps them from spending as much time with patients as they would like and leads to feelings of burnout. To help providers serve patients better and reduce time-consuming paperwork, eClinicalWorks used Microsoft Azure, specifically Azure AI Services, to create a solution.

Managing millions of documents across thousands of practices

eClinicalWorks was founded in 1999 to provide healthcare practices with access to new technology and help digitize documentation. Today, eClinicalWorks serves over 180,000 providers and 1 million medical professionals with the latest innovations in cloud-based and AI-driven electronic health records and practice management solutions. The company is working to modernize and democratize the healthcare industry.

Many healthcare practices today collect and share medical records via fax, leading to staff and physicians spending hours sorting through faxed information and connecting it with the correct patient chart. “Somebody has to manually review each fax and determine who the patient is, categorize and assign the document to the appropriate subfolder, and assign to staff for further review,” says Shilpa Hegde, Vice President of Engineering at eClinicalWorks. “There are multiple checks they must go through within the document to confirm that it’s the right patient and categorize the document.”

With around 13 million faxes still exchanged each year in medical facilities, eClinicalWorks saw an opportunity to help healthcare staff save time and reduce burnout. It turned to Microsoft for help.

Saving hundreds of practices up to one minute per fax with Azure AI Document Intelligence

eClinicalWorks knew that Microsoft provided scalable, secure solutions that it could use to create a tool for managing documentation. “We’ve worked with Microsoft for over 10 years,” says Bharat Satyanarayan, Vice President of Technology and Quality Assurance at eClinicalWorks. “When we go to them with a problem statement, their experts can guide us by showing us what services we could use to accomplish our goal most effectively.”

In early 2023, eClinicalWorks developed a solution built on Azure AI Services that can extract patient data from faxed documents using Azure AI Document Intelligence. The tool quickly scans each fax and determines what type of document it is and to which patient it belongs. So far, 427 practices have implemented this solution and scanned nearly 2.2 million faxes, saving up to one minute per incoming fax. The solution accurately identifies and matches patients for 75–85% of incoming faxes.

Moving toward increased provider and patient satisfaction with AI tools

eClinicalWorks has developed modern solutions to support healthcare providers and patients and strives to democratize AI in healthcare with innovative and responsible AI tools.

eClinicalWorks is exploring more avenues in which to use AI, from helping patients to supporting IT teams. It has also rolled out an AI assistant to transcribe patient interactions so that providers can focus on patients rather than filling out charts. “Artificial intelligence is augmenting the workflows and making things more efficient so that providers and staff can do what they really love to do—take care of patients,” says Hegde.

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