Recondo rolls out prior authorization tool to automate process
Tool takes manual process and replaces it with software bots that link payer, provider websites.
Recondo Technology, a revenue cycle management firm, on Monday launched a new product to automate prior authorizations, effectively eliminating the need for healthcare providers to employ large teams to obtain them from insurers, according to the company.
The solution, called AuthInitiate, inputs and retrieves web-based information from insurer websites at a much higher speed than when the task is attempted manually, Recondo said. This enables hospitals and other provider organizations to automate nearly the entire authorization process, from requesting a prior authorization to confirming its status.
More hospitals now routinely take on the responsibility of obtaining prior authorizations from payers on behalf of both employed and non-employed physicians, according to Recondo. In doing so, hospitals are both protecting and potentially eroding their financial bottom line. While gaining control assures that steps are taken to obtain these authorizations, the steps themselves can be cumbersome and labor-intensive.
[Also: Recondo, revenue cycle platform operator, scores $16 million in new funding]
Requesting a single authorization, for example, typically takes at least 15 minutes. It requires a staff member to visit a payer's website, then copy and paste a significant amount of non-clinical and clinical patient data into numerous fields. For large, multi-facility IDNs, the process can require delegating hundreds of employees, or writing significant outsourcing checks.
That's what AuthInitiate addresses: Bots log in to the payer's website on behalf of the provider, using the provider's credentials. Additional technology within the solution auto-populates patient data, drawing on the industry's most robust authorization rules library of over 700,000 rules, which are continuously curated and expanded.
Twitter: @JELagasse
