CoSign Digital Signatures for Healthcare Organizations - Business Case

Digital signatures enable the replacement of slow, expensive, and non-productive paper-based approval, collaboration, and delivery processes with fast, low-cost, and efficient digital operations. This results in:

• Improved operational efficiency, reduced cycle time, and eliminated costs;
• Mitigated risk, ensured compliance, data quality, and long-term file retention;
• Increased competitiveness and service levels

Digital Signatures can automate your signature-based approvals affordably, allowing you to go paperless, cut costs, and expedite business processes. Digital signatures are particularly beneficial for organizations that:

• Need to sign and send compliant records produced by their EMR/EDM system to patients, other providers, insurers, or regulators
• Wish to obtain patient signatures on admission and consent forms electronically
• Employ out-of-office staff who need to submit compliant and signed reports
• Need to route documents requiring authorizations across multiple sites
• Wish to remain paperless for credentialing, information release requests, and other back office activities
• Wish to launch patient-facing web portals with forms that require completion and signing.

• Patient consent forms
• House call/mobile provider reports
• Health records
• Prescriptions for drugs
• Lab reports
• Doctor's orders
• Clinical evaluations
• Clinical orders

By demanding engineers to spend valuable time on printing, manually signing, and routing documents, paper-based signatures incur organizational costs, and cause delays and inefficiencies. It is estimated that each paper signature costs an organization $5.40 in associated expenses (i.e. paper, printing, signing, scanning, routing, archiving and replacing lost documents;  Pfizer estimates this cost at $30). Based on actual log data of ARX's customers, the average authorized signer signs over 250 documents per year, bringing the annual paper-based costs per signer to over $1,350. This figure is much higher for organizations with multiple locations and/or field staff that need to submit formal reports or contracts.

The CoSign digital signature solution eliminates these costs through a simple, scalable and quick-to-deploy solution. CoSign makes it easy to digitally sign all standard file formats by embedding the digital signature directly into the document and sealing it from change. CoSign digital signatures enable regulatory compliance, and support graphical signatures and multiple signatures per document.

Calculate the return on investment of implementing digital signatures in your organization by downloading our digital signature ROI whitepaper and Excel spreadsheet.