Intelligent Document Processing in Healthcare: From 6M to 40M Documents

A leading nonprofit health system in North America serves more than 10 million people each year across 33 hospitals. As the system grew through clinic acquisitions, so did the volume of important Personal Health Information (PHI) and administrative documents. Capacity to process and manage these documents needed to scale, while downstream reporting, compliance, and cost pressures intensified. 

Ashling was engaged to provide development support within their Intelligent Automation program. As the partnership grew, we uncovered gaps extending beyond build support, and into the foundational operating model and economics supporting it.

Limited governance and development standards increased compliance exposure, drove SLA breaches and rework, inflated run costs, and made value hard to audit—raising both operational and financial risk. Without integrated technology, proper queue management and human-in-the-loop design, analysts hunted through logs instead of resolving exceptions. 

Tool fit compounded the problem. Complex, costly platforms that required highly skilled developers and outside services slowed every new build. Delivery costs climbed, scalability stalled, and value realization lagged.

The path forward started with one big audacious goal: establish an automation foundation that can scale with clinical operations by improving design and governance standards, ensuring the right technology and business fit, and empowering teams to build faster, own more, and deliver value sooner.  

To do that, we set our focus on the highest-value use cases, starting with traceability. 

An Operating Model That Runs at Scale

FlexiCapture was our client's tool of choice for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). But failed document jobs were difficult to surface and even harder to trace. The tool alone had limited queue and retry controls which left business analysts bouncing between logs without a single, reliable timeline. The objective was simple: help analysts troubleshoot and resolve document processing jobs faster. 

We introduced an orchestration wrapper that connected ABBYY FlexiCapture to Blue Prism so every document became a traceable queue item with a clear path from intake to completion. Human-in-the-loop checkpoint design brought exceptions into context, and CTWO load balancing kept queues moving under peak demand.  

With design best practices implemented, traceability, troubleshooting and compliance improved, and analysts shifted from log hunting to targeted exception management. Mean time to resolution dropped, and straight-through processing rose, improving time to value.

Each new FlexiCapture build required skilled developer resources, which slowed delivery and suppressed platform utilization. To put control back in the hands of business users, we led a successful feasibility test, ensuring all Flexi builds could be migrated to ABBYY Vantage—a tool analysts could configure and iterate faster within their new governance framework. 

The shift improved useability and reduced reliance on their small pool of developers and external service providers. Platform utilization increased and costs dropped.

With ABBYY Vantage in production, skills like “The Splitter” could be leveraged. The business could now process Prior Auth packets quickly and accurately—routing handwritten notes to “Chorus” for specialized handwritten extraction and leveraging Vantage for typed documentation. In testing, Chorus read handwriting at over 95% accuracy, while ABBYY lent ~86%. That 9% difference was key to ensuring the quality and compliance of Personal Health Information (PHI) data extraction, while the split-path design ensured cost per unit stayed in check.

As the team’s confidence in the operating model increased, it was time to test it on the clinical floor. Nurses were spending hours manually re-keying schedules and patient assignments in multiple systems—the perfect use case for a Proof of Concept (PoC). The result? Automated scheduling assignment and synchronized updates across downstream systems was more than just feasible, it made a real impact. The program returned roughly 20,000 hours per year to nurses, equivalent to more than one million dollars in annual savings, and set a new norm that automation should lighten clinical workloads.

The health system scaled document capacity from about 6 million to 40 million per year while improving control and audit-ability. The wrapper and human-in-the-loop design cut mean time to resolution, raised straight-through processing, and reduced rework. Migration to ABBYY Vantage increased analyst self-service and lowered reliance on scarce developers and external services, improving time to value, costs and platform utilization. Most importantly, clinical teams felt the change. Hours returned to care and confidence grew that automation could scale without compromising compliance.

By the numbers:

Our client now has an operating model that proves value, protects patients, and scales. The combination of clear governance, the right platform fit, and a design framework that makes work observable and repeatable delivered measurable economics and better experiences for analysts and clinicians alike. 

If you want an automation program that pays for itself and compounds as you grow, Ashling can help you stand it up, prove it, and keep it running. 

Technology Used