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Get Started with Intelligent Document Automation

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you will be able to:

  • Explain the objects in Intelligent Document Automation.
  • Explain Intelligent Document Automation phases.
  • Set up a document type.

Harryette Randall is the office manager and Salesforce admin for Bloomington Caregivers, a home healthcare agency in Bloomington, Minnesota. The facility is routinely swamped with documents related to its patients. Harryette leads a team of three who handle both documentation and front-office duties. Feeling overwhelmed, Harryette decides to set up Intelligent Document Automation to ease the burden of her team. But before she does that, let us get to know the objects you’ll find in Intelligent Document Automation.

The Intelligent Document Workspace

IDA features the Intelligent Document Workspace that allows you to upload new documents and process them.

The Received Documents tab, showing the buttons New, Upload Documents, and Printable View.

The objects or tabs in the Document Workspace include Received Documents, Document Checklist, Document Scan Results, and Action Plan Templates. Let’s find out more about them.

Received Documents: All uploaded documents land in the Received Documents tab. The Received Documents tab also lets you view all the existing documents in the document workspace. Documents come from multiple sources, such as the facility’s fax partners, hospitals transferring patients to another facility, and manual uploads. And you can upload multiple documents at the same time. Once the documents have been uploaded, you can pick them from the queue and attach them to specific objects, such as Program Enrollee, Case, Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity, and so on.

Document Checklist: Each time you register a patient, you must collect some necessary documents from them. Document checklist allows you to create a checklist that shows all the available and pending documents of the patient. You can split the uploaded documents into smaller documents by selecting the pages in the workspace or typing the page numbers into the custom page selector. The document checklist helps you trace them to the original document.

Document Scan Results: Every uploaded document is scanned so that the data can be extracted. You use this data to populate patient information.

Action Plan Templates: An action plan template defines the tasks and other items needed to complete a business process. In this case, it sets out the different stages the documents go through, before being assigned to an object. Action plans improve the consistency of document workflows. IDA’s action plan templates guide you to the right section of the document at every stage. We’ll learn more about action plan templates in later units.

Note

You may not see all these tabs in the org you signed up for. To go to another tab, click the dropdown arrow beside the existing tab. To add more tabs to the dropdown menu, click the dropdown arrow beside the existing tab and select Edit.

IDA Phases

IDA forms a natural gateway through which all documents pass and get processed. It consolidates all the phases of a document’s lifecycle, from the time it is uploaded to its final post-processing. Here are the five phases a document goes through in IDA. 

  1. Inbound/Outbound Channels: Documents can come in through several channels like fax, manual uploads, and even physical copies.
  2. Routing: Establishing a clear path for documents goes a long way in creating order in documentation. New documents are scanned using Amazon Textract and assigned to specific objects.
  3. Queue: The queue of documents in the Received Documents tab shows all the documents on a single screen. It can be customized to show which patient the document is attached to, and other useful information.
  4. Processing: Every received and uploaded document gets processed. As soon as you upload a document, IDA creates a Received Document record for the document and allows you to extract data from selected pages. You can use the data to populate different fields related to a patient. You can attach the scanned document to a document checklist item, assign it to a queue, or trigger a flow. The uploaded documents can be rotated, zoomed in, split into two or more documents, and reviewed from the same workspace (more on this in the next unit).
  5. Post-processing: The scanned and processed documents are reviewed against the data that has been entered into fields. This allows you to verify all the information that you’ve received through document scans.

Set Up a Document Type

To get started with IDA, Harryette must enable the Document Checklist functionality and define the specific document types that her team receives. Document types help categorize and organize incoming paperwork appropriately. 

Here’s what Harryette does to enable the Document Checklist functionality.

  1. ClickSetup and select Setup.
  2. In the Quick Find box, search for and select Document Checklist Settings.
  3. Enable Checklist Items with Attachments.

The Document Checklist Settings page with Checklist Items with Attachments enabled.

Having enabled Document Checklist Settings, she creates a document type to handle patient referrals.

  1. Click Setup and select Setup.
  2. In the Quick Find box, search for and select Document Type.
  3. Click New Document Type.
  4. Enter a name for the document type. Harryette enters Patient Referral.

Next, Harryette assigns the permissions users will need to work with documents and forms. For patient referrals, these users are typically case managers or intake coordinators. 

With the right permission sets, Harryette and her team can easily add and map documents. In the next unit, we follow along as Harryette uploads and processes documents.

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