Health Care Industry and Automated e-Signature

State of the Industry

The healthcare industry is going through significant changes. The complexity of the industry, new federal legislation, regulations, enormous costs and other factors are putting a pressure on industry players to improve work processes, increase compliance, privacy (HIPAA) and patient satisfaction. With the HITECH Act, there is a growing movement to build a national health infrastructure to improve patient care and reduce costs, prevent errors and loss or misplacement of records. To provide efficient and high quality care, healthcare providers need to rely on accurate and complete medical records. Healthcare providers of all sizes are looking for ways to become more efficient. Modernizing expensive and outdated paper-intensive business processes, complying with laws and regulations, and maintaining control and audit tracking over core business processes have all become a central business target in the healthcare industry.

ComSignTrust offers the very best security and privacy in the industry, helping healthcare providers meet all compliance requirements through its wide range of digital signature solutions. Each e-Signed document comes with a timestamp, an audit trail and a tamper-proof seal, providing strong legal evidence in a court of law. With ComSignTrust, all data can be automatically sent to your back-end systems, enabling end-to-end electronic medical record processing. Using ComSignTrust, documents are routed for electronic authentication and signature through the use of a computer or even a mobile device, enabling healthcare providers to be on the move or see their patients in their homes. Documents can also be automatically sent to the home healthcare provider’s back-end system, which closes the loop and automates the entire process.

“ ComSignTrust enables the patient to pick up his regular medication at his own
convenient time and place, without having to go through his local clinic to collect a paper prescription.
Moreover, digital prescription dispensing saves our doctors precious time currently invested in printing and manually signing prescriptions.”
Dr. Joseph BaHagun,
Director of the Digital Medicine Division at Clalit

How Automated e-Signatures Help Healthcare

Paper patient forms can be a big hassle for patients and staff. Forms have to be scanned or re-keyed, handwritten notes can be hard to read and patients often forget to fill out essential information.

ComSignTrust helps healthcare organizations eliminate the need to print, scan and handle documents. Instead, healthcare organizations regain control and visibility into their operations as a result of keeping processes completely electronic, from beginning to end.

With ComSignTrust Automated e-Signature you can:

Adopt electronic processes in compliance with regulations and laws
Cut down costs through eliminating manual tasks related to document printing, scanning, copying, physical handling, mailing, filing and shredding, an average of $5.00 per document
Save time and resources through freeing-up personnel from administrative burden
Automate your document signing processes eliminate delays of paper documents in transit and improve the efficiency of your organizational data workflow
Speed up processes multiple signatures on one document within a few minutes
Reduce errors caused by manual data entry and lost documents
Increase documents security with secure encrypted e-Signatures and tamper-proof Seals
Maintain the privacy of the organization and patients
Increase staff productivity and enable more time to spend with patients
Get secure, cost-effective managed digital storage for electronic medical record processing

In real terms, that means an organization with 200 employees, who will sign on average 500 documents annually will produce 100,000 documents. At an average cost of $5.00 per document, that’s $500,000 annually. The math is clear; automated e-Signture can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Regulations and Standards

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) strongly recommends that organizations authenticate and manage digital identities, in order to protect the confidentiality and integrity of personal health information. ComSignTrust’s digital signatures which are based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standards, are the highest ranked digital signatures when it comes to protecting the integrity of the information. In fact, HIPAA requires the protection of integrity “to corroborate that electronically protected health information has not been altered or destroyed in an unauthorized manner”. Documents digitally signed with ComSignTrust are sealed and tamper-resistant, reducing the risk of any potential fraudulent activity.

With ComSignTrust Automated e-Signature healthcare organizations can comply with the following regulatory requirements:

HIPAA The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA 45 CFR 142, 160, & 164)
eIDAS
ESIGN Act
UETA
Hospital Medical Record Services (42 CFR 482.24)
Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO)
Medicare Part B
FDA (21 CFR Part 11)
Electronic Prescription of Controlled Substances (EPCS)
HITECH Act

ComSignTrust offers Automated e-Signature solutions as a simple way to automate the signing of all FDA regulated clinical trial forms and to comply with the requirements for electronic submission of all documents, including:

Form 1571 (investigational new drug application)
Form 1572 (statement of investigator)
Form 3454 (certification: financial interests and arrangements)
Form 3455 (disclosure: financial interests and arrangements of clinical investigators)
Informed consent

In accordance with the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), ComSignTrust’s digital signatures meet the strongest level of electronic signatures found in medical records, Level 3.

A Level 3 digital signature is a cryptographic signature (a digital key) that authenticates the user, provides nonrepudiation and ensures document integrity. This is the strongest signature because it protects the signed document with a tamper-proof seal informing the reader in case the document has been altered.

e-Signature Usage in Healthcare

The application priorities for digital signatures in healthcare-related paperwork include:

• Patient records
• Physician/medical reports
• Patient (HIPAA) consent forms
• Release of medical information
• Insurance claims processing
• Drug prescriptions
• Lab reports
• Home healthcare and hospice
• And more

Additional Added Value to e-Signature Adoption in Healthcare

Highly regulated industries such as healthcare are recognizing the enormous value of moving business processes online. Adoption has accelerated in recent years as eSignature have become a foundational technology needed to achieve streamlined e-Processing. Much more than an optional feature enabling patient records’ management, automated e-Signature can be deployed at the enterprise level with flexibility and functionalities available for a variety of work processes within different departments, such as:

• Service Department – Patient onboarding, digital hospital
• Finance Department – Medicare billing, accounting, TAX lieu, digital archiving
• HR Department – HR-related paperwork such as hiring documentation, benefits enrollment, credentialing health care providers and nurses
• Procurement Department – improving and speeding up work processes in purchasing and vendor onboarding with greater visibility and control, tenders, purchase orders
• Legal Department – Agreements, legal case management

With ComSignTrust™ automated e-Signature solution you can be sure the job will get done faster and more efficient. To find out more about ComSignTrust’s automated digital signature solution click here.