What healthcare leaders need to know about Intelligent Document Processing

The fax machine remains a persistent part of day-to-day operations in healthcare, with many organizations relying on it to receive vital information such as referrals, test results, and patient orders. Yet these documents often arrive unstructured, requiring hours of manual transcription, data entry, and triage by staff. 

Intelligent Document Processing automates this outdated, manual workflow and fundamentally transforms how healthcare organizations scale access to care. It eliminates bottlenecks that traditionally delay care coordination and overwhelm staff, enabling information to flow more efficiently across the organization and enabling health systems to serve more patients with the same level of resources. 

Here’s everything healthcare leaders should know about implementing an Intelligent Document Processing workflow at their organization.

What is Intelligent Document Processing?

Intelligent Document Processing automates the intake, transcription, and labeling of structured and unstructured documents, such as faxes. AI Agents extract text and key data from the document, which they can then send back to EHRs or document management systems (DMSs). Automating this manual, time-consuming process reduces administrative burden on staff and improves turnaround times for patients. 

How fast is the processing time and what outcomes does it lead to?

AI Agents process documents in near real-time, typically with a 10-15 minute turnaround time. When a fax or document arrives, the AI Agents begin extracting and structuring the data immediately. This ensures that urgent referrals are identified and worked on hours or days faster than manual workflows allow.

Intelligent Document Processing reduces manual work for staff, accelerates time-to-schedule, and reduces leakage. With AI Agents handling the transcription and labeling of incoming documents, staff can focus on edge cases or other important work. 

A Florida health system has automated the transcription of over 10,000 faxed orders without staff intervention, saving staff 8,000 hours annually and allowing the cross-training of four FTEs to focus on other areas of opportunity for professional growth and strategic business priorities. The health system has reduced its average turnaround time from referral received to transcription from 48 hours to 10 minutes. 

Montage Health was able to reduce its referral work turnaround time from 14 days to three days with the help of Intelligent Document Processing.

How does Intelligent Document Processing differ from traditional OCR solutions?

Traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) simply scrapes text from a page and often struggles with handwriting or unstructured formats. Intelligent automation, on the other hand, can actually understand the context in the document, such as distinguishing a patient’s date of birth from an appointment date or a CPT code from a phone number. It can also match unstructured data, such as a procedure description, to data fields in the EHR, such as order codes, structure that data, and integrate it directly into the EHR. 

Intelligent Document Processing through Notable also integrates directly with each health system’s existing infrastructure via SFTP, HL7, and FHIR to deliver structured data exactly where it needs to go, whether it is specific fields or discrete inputs.

Can AI Agents automatically route documents to the correct work queue?

When categories are well-defined, and routing rules exist in your DMS or EHR, AI Agents can identify the document type – whether it’s a referral, lab result, or consult note – and apply the necessary labels. They then deliver this structured information into the DMS or EHR to send the document to the precise work queue or attach it to the patient’s chart.

How do AI Agents prioritize urgent referrals vs. routine documents?

Since documents are processed in near-real time, both urgent and routine orders and referrals are transcribed within 10-15 minutes. If orders need to go through an additional review process, AI Agents can label documents based on the priority stated on the document or assign priority based on custom logic defined by the health system.

Can staff review or correct data before it’s finalized in the chart?

Yes – Intelligent Document Processing workflows are designed to support a human-in-the-loop. If the AI encounters a document with low confidence, such as poor image quality or missing fields, it can flag the item for staff review. Staff can then validate or correct specific fields before the data is exported to the patient record. 

What specific data fields can be automatically extracted?

AI Agents can extract and digitize comprehensive clinical and administrative data, including patient demographics, referring provider details, order and diagnosis codes, order priority, scheduling notes, and more. This data is converted from the image into discrete fields ready to be put back into the EHR.

How does the model maintain high performance and data security over time?

It’s important to work with a trusted partner to ensure performance and data security in AI models. 

At Notable, we take a "safety-first" approach to AI learning. Rather than allowing the AI to update itself automatically without supervision, we have a managed improvement process. We partner with you to perform ongoing quality assurance of a small sample of documents to ensure accuracy standards are being maintained. The models are only updated after our team reviews staff corrections to derisk the model learning incorrect behavior.

Notable is also fully HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 Type II certified, and built with enterprise-grade security standards. We treat patient data with the highest level of care, ensuring encryption and compliance at every step of the processing workflow. Visit our Trust Center to learn about our data security and compliance.

Investing in the health system of the future

Intelligent Document Processing is more than a workflow upgrade. It’s a strategic investment in speed, accuracy, and staff capacity. By automating the transcription and routing of incoming documents, healthcare organizations can significantly reduce turnaround times, redeploy staff to higher-value tasks, and improve patient experience.

‍Get in touch today to learn how you can deploy Intelligent Document Processing at your health system in just a few weeks.