Integrated Behavioral Health

Integrated Behavioral Health (IBH), of Laguna Niguel, Calif., specializes in behavioral health plan administration, employee assistance programs, psychiatric disability management and work-life services. The managed-care provider serves Fortune 1000 employers, business coalitions, insurance companies, union health plans, HMO's and PPO's.

The company had grown so rapidly, however—800 percent over nine years—that it’s paper-based systems were creating barriers to effective service. Case documents were not readily accessible for review, and claims required an unacceptably long time to process. The claims were being logged and distributed manually, producing mounds of paper throughout the organization. Eventually the backlog totaled 800 to 1,000 claims, and hundreds of file cabinets were stuffed with client charts. Mailroom staff was overburdened by sorting mail and inter-office paperwork and routing it to the appropriate desk. Claims could occasionally be misplaced in this process, delaying the initiation of appropriate actions relating to the information the forms contain, and sour the experience and satisfaction of clients.

To resolve these issues, IBH searched for a comprehensive enterprise content management system that offered the processing power and flexibility mandated by larger health-care insurers.

IBH reviewed solutions from many vendors; and after evaluating these offerings, management selected Microsoft SharePoint Server, integrated with KnowledgeLake Capture. Implemented by KnowledgeLake, a St. Louis-based Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) provided a unified database where all information about clients would be stored and could be accessed by authorized personnel through a SharePoint Web portal.

The KnowledgeLake Capture solution enabled IBH to scan its existing paper documents in batches, storing them in TIFF, PDF and XPS file formats, and to index them for retrieval via SharePoint.

Since deploying the comprehensive SharePoint solution, IBH has grown by 200 percent in its operations, and that growth has been easily managed by just two people. Customer service has improved and productivity has soared.

The significant amount of time shared among seven employees in staffing the mailroom has been dramatically reduced by digitizing all of the paperwork.

Each day, IBH receives, indexes, processes and completes payment for approximately 200 claims using SharePoint workflow.

The accuracy and quality of the information has improved.

Original source documents for claims now can be viewed in just seconds, rather than the hours previously required; so customer service and satisfaction have increased.

Most claims now are processed within a day, and the backlog has all but disappeared.

The problem of trying to locate claims has been eliminated with the transformation from paper to electronic data.

All documents are tracked throughout the organization so that personnel can determine the status of a claim at any stage.