Author: Thota Divya Sri, Dr. Doppalapudi Sandeep, Dr. Suryadevara Vidyadhara

Outline:

Entry of patient demographic process is a key factor in assessment of a person during any in and outpatient registration process in hospitals. It is essential in case of any emergency situation. The current article gives complete details and model of a patient demographic entry process.

Definition

Patient demographics are such practices which benefits greatly such as basic identifying of information and insurance-related details by which they help in knowing the information of particular patients about the identification and insurance information.

Introduction

A patient’s fundamental information is reflected in their patient demographics. Patient demographics are gathered by practice to improve care and speed up the medical coding and billing process. Although they are not exactly the same, this data coincides with the marketing demographics. Practitioners use the patient demographics to assist the people who are behind them and who are paying bills for their services in contrast to marketers, who use demographics to identify which consumers may be worthy of their attention. [1]

Nowadays, every health care organization is gathering the patient demographic details. But few are aware that each and every point of information gathered from the patient is essential for filing insurance claims.

Content of the Patient Demographics

Patient demographics include the information about the patient, which includes different types of information as follows; [2]

• Demographic information
• Healthcare insurance information
• Medical information and
• Payment information
• Demographic Information

It includes the information about the patient like legal name, age, gender, address, phone number and the patient’s social security number.

• Healthcare Insurance Information

It includes the information of a person who pays the bill with their name, mail address for claims and the group numbers and also the information about primary and secondary payer and the information a medical care card.

• Medical information

It includes all the medical history, allergies and particular needs interpreter, assistants for the physically disabled people, medications, ambulance, stretcluraccess.

• Payment information

It includes different details of the payers and consists of name, address and the phone number.

Types of Patient Demographics

Patient demographics are of different types as following

• Paper forms and scanned images
• Electronic medical record entries

Most of the time, patients are asked to fill a manual paper containing their information. After it could be electronically recorded. Or in some cases, all the information could be entered electronically if a hospital is equipped with e-patient database and related software. [3]

An Example of a paper form of patient demographic form is given below;

How to collect patient demographics?

Demographics data collection and tracking procedures should be standardized, much like all patient intake and registration procedures. The problem is that numerous practices manage at professionals have repeatedly seen faulty patient demographic collecting and tracking procedures. [4] The following advice and technologies can assist the firm’s business stay clear of this problem.

1. Make the right enquiries

To enquire whether the information is current or not and whether they could get their personal information or not. The patient intake procedure should be as effective as possible and one should believe that the information is accurate.

2. Set up of electronic medical record for easy data intake

One will require a location to keep the data that collected once. This location is increasingly an electronic medical record (EMR) platform. These platforms provide easy acess to patient data while safeguarding it with stronger digital security features than physical storage. They also make sharing information with doctors working in other sites simple and efficient across your practice. [5]

Nevertheless, not all practices now employ EMR technology. According to data from the centers for disease control and prevention (CDC) office based doctors still don’t use an EMR as of in march 2020. Finding the ideal EMR system of your office can be a simple which is excellent news.

Usage of a software for EMR is the best option for anyone to enter, to maintain, to assess and to retrieve any patient’s information in their hospital.

How medical billing companies safeguards the patient demographic data?

The best medical billing business make sure their customers have a flowless experience when using their services. Protecting sensitive data, such as patient information is a step in that process. Here are some actions they take:

To protect patient information reliable medical billing business constantly uphold the compliance with federal laws. This indicates that they adhere to the HIPAA law. Medical billing business are required by HIPAA regulations to safeguard patient data from any of the unauthorized parties.

You may be confident that your EMR will be secure when shared with the billing teams on the other end, if the medical billing businesses preserve the information using software tools.

Patient data maintenance issues

The upkeep of patient data is another significant issue that hospitals face. Outsourced billing business can be useful in this situation when the hospital outsources its billing process. The outsourcing firm is responsible for claims patient information and data accuracy. They have received thorough training on how to obtain information about insurance claims, procedures, processing times and other topics.

They are also acknowledged about the different medical billing programs. For hospitals, this makes their job simpler. Most importantly, outsourcing lightens the work load of medical professionals and personnel. However, it also readily raises the claim revenues by 20 to 30 percent.

Importance of patient demographics entry for medical claims

• It is understandable that healthcare practitioners struggle to get timely payments on unpaid bills.
• Receiving payment quickly requires attention to one crucial factor in patient demographics, whether it’s an in-house billing department or an outsourced medical company.
• Updates of the patient demographics are crucial for patients who frequently visits the offices of health care experts, just as they are the brand-new patients.
• If the current patient’s information is not gathered and his phone number is not changed, the claim will not be paid.
• Therefore it is constantly important to update and add patient demographic information for both current and new patients. [6]
• The patient typically won’t object for having their information saved in the system. So even if you ask them a question, they respond.
• Patient demographics involves the precise inclusion information which will go a long way towards preventing claim denials and the rejections.
• These patient demographics are important to guide the billing process.
• It also ensures the streamline patient communications.
• It improves the patient care.
• These will increase the cultural competency.

Benefits of maintaining patient demographics

Accurate entry of patient data eliminates the work and speeds up payments while also cutting down on days spent in accounts receivable. [7] A patient registration team could be maintained and trained to identify mistakes made during the patient registration procedure and will cooperate with the clients of business to:

• Reduce operational costs by nearly 40 percent

The cost of in-house patient registration services varies. The work queries are picked up by the team member who meticulously process each patient record.

• Enhances the output and precision

One can ascertain that the work done by the team members is of high caliber because of the guaranteed service levels provided for accuracy and turn around time.

• Account administration and cooperation

To enhance the overall efficiency and efficiency of the patient registration process, the account management staff collaborates with the consumers. Through real time portals, daily quality states reports and turnaround time, the team collaborates with the consumers.

• Soft proficiency

By the patient demographics, the medical billing wholesalers are proficient in over 20 different practice management systems.

• Medical coding and charge entry

The patient demographics entry process is often clubbed with the medical coding and charge entry process depending on the software functionality. At times the process is performed by the charge entry across the medical specialties. [8]

Regular updation of patient data

One may also experience a change in contact information such as an address or phone number. Therefore, it is crucial to stay in touch with the patients so that one can aware of any changes to their information. While keeping in touch with the patients is a good idea, having conversations can sometimes be detrimental. A news letter or an email sent once in a month or every two months may be sufficient. They may send them an online form every 2 months or so asking them to update it with the most recent information.

Thus patient demographic information and its entry process is a must in need of focus part in order to treat patient in a proper and complete manner.

References:

1. Sager N, Lyman M, Bucknall C, Nhan N, Tick LJ. Natural language processing and the representation of clinical data. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 1994;1(2):142–160.
2. Jung Jason J. Online named entity recognition method for microtexts in social networking services: A case study of twitter. Expert Systems with Applications. 2012;39(9):8066–8070.
3. Sondhi P, Gupta M, Zhai CX, Hockenmaier J. Shallow information extraction from medical forum data; Proceedings of the 23^rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters; Association for Computational Linguistics; 2010. pp. 1158–1166.
4. El-Said A, Patil R, Leone B, Gulani A, Abrams MP, Momin A, Simms-Cendan J. Assessing the Impact of Demographic Factors on Presenting Conditions or Complaints Among Internal Medicine Patients in an Underserved Population in Central Florida. Cureus. 14(8): e27811.
5. Lishchyna N, Mior S. Demographic and clinical characteristics of new patients presenting to a community teaching clinic. J Chiropr Educ. 2012 Fall;26(2):161-8.
6. Da’ar, O.B., Al-Mutairi, T. How do patient demographics, time-related variables, reasons for cancellation, and clinical procedures affect frequency of same-day operating room surgery cancelation? A maximum likelihood method. BMC Health Serv Res18, 454 (2018).
7. Friedman Carol. A broad-coverage natural language processing system; Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium; American Medical Informat Friedman Carol. American Medical Informatics Association; 2000. p. 270.
8. Chen JG, Lee S, Khallouq BB. Association of Demographics and Hospital Stay Characteristics With Patient Experience in Hospitalized Pediatric Patients. Journal of Patient Experience. 2020;7(6):1077-1085.