Health insurance companies record receipts manually

01.12.2009 15:51

Innovation study 2009

Four out of five health insurance companies have incoming receipts and invoices recorded and processed manually. This is the result of the innovation study by the companies ArztData GmbH and exorbyte GmbH. In 76.2 percent of the companies surveyed, the data was recorded by permanent employees, and in another 2.9 percent it was temporary employees.

A total of 18 percent of all health insurance companies already have receipts recognized and processed automatically using optical character recognition (OCR). Most of them (12.4 percent) rely on OCR, in which the content is compared with master data. The remaining companies use OCR exclusively (3.8 percent) or in conjunction with fuzzy logic software (1.9 percent).

Bodo Kröger, Managing Director of ArztData, is surprised by the results: “Paying staff is much more expensive than the document capture techniques available today. And on top of that, manual processing leads to significantly more errors. There are definitely still great economic treasures to be uncovered here, especially when it comes to statutory health insurance.”

As part of the 2009 innovation study, 598 employees of German health insurance companies were surveyed. 106 gave valid answers. This corresponds to a rate of 17.8 percent. The study commissioned by ArztData GmbH and exorbyte GmbH was carried out by GGMA Gesellschaft für Gesundheitmarktanalyse mbH. DoctorData specializes in address management in the healthcare market.