If your company operates in a regulated industry like healthcare insurance, chances are you have a busy mailroom – with limited time to respond to incoming grievances and appeals (G&A) in a compliant manner.
It can be tempting to hire more people to handle the load, but adding more staff members to the process is expensive, and won’t help you expedite your process – which is what you really want to do in order to ensure your company remains compliant.
That’s because paper-based processes will always be slower and more complicated than ones that involve digital documents – increasing your risk of noncompliance – for the following reasons:
- Paper documents need to be physically passed from person to person within the process
- Paper documents can be lost or misplaced, causing even further delays
- Receiving and distributing paper documents is time consuming
- Paper documents can make it difficult to prove the date your mailroom received a particular request, making audits riskier and more complicated (more on this below)
To elaborate on that last point, the major challenge here is that dates on physical stamps can be easily blurred. When that happens, auditors must look back to earlier dates in order to gauge compliance; for example, they may ask for the date the original letter was written or sent vs. received. This can set your company up for some close calls when it comes to measuring response time.
Mailroom scanning services are a sustainable, cost-effective way to comply with regulations
When you choose mailroom scanning services, you essentially outsource your mailroom and replace your paper-based process with one that is digitized and streamlined.
It’s wise to choose a mailroom scanning services provider that does all of the following:
- Establishes a local P.O. box and picks up your mail daily from it
- Opens envelopes and prepares documents for scanning
- Electronically timestamps each page and envelope during the scanning process
- Manually quality controls every image
- Captures and indexes the sender’s full name, stamped date, and letter date
- Delivers images securely within 24 hours–at which point you can download your digitized documents for immediate processing
- Please note that all of this should be done using a secure, SOC Type 2 scanning facility for minimized liability and maximum safety and peace of mind
This helps your company operate within compliance guidelines by:
- Optimizing the process of responding to incoming mail
- Eliminating paper documents which can easily be misplaced or lost
- Shortening your response time
- Keeping you prepared for audits, making them easier and less risky by establishing reliable proof of delivery dates and times for each request (no more relying on fragile physical stamps)
A mailroom scanning services success story
Read our Visiting Nurse Services of NY case study to learn how they successfully implemented our mailroom scanning services to create an additional layer of compliance security and saved over $6,000 per year on various costs in the process.
