My work recently decided to go paperless. They say it is because they want to help the
environment….and to save money.
For whatever reason, it is a decision that I can get behind.
Even though it is something I back 100% the transition has
not been easy for me. I like being able to have visual clues, things I can
touch to help keep myself organized.
For me out of sight is completely out of mind.
For auditing purposes we have to keep everything on file for
2 years.
For each claim we have to have the appropriate backup.
Sometimes claims need 72 pages of backup.
With the amount of claims we process each day we were going through a
lot of paper.
Like A LOT OF PAPER.
How we are solving this is by “printing” to PDF and saving
everything to a website.
How do you print to PDF?
Here is a how to YouTube video that explains it more
thoroughly and more simply than all of my attempts.
The only issue that I have is each time you print to PDF you
lose some clarity. So if you do it too many times whatever you are printing
gets illegible.
The way I avoid this is by planning out what I am going to
do, from start to finish so I don’t have to print to PDF too many times.
“Printing” only once is the goal. That way minimal clarity
is lost.
This does mean that I sometimes have like 7 to 10 things
open all at once, and it does get a little overwhelming, but it is doable.
This is good and bad, I have to slow down and plan each
step. So I am less likely to make mistakes now, but I can’t process claims as
fast.
I have to have visual cues to help me stay organized. I use
to have stacks of paper all over the place and I was constantly shuffling them,
now that they are gone I had to find another method.
What I have now is a tracker in Excel. It is much easier and
faster to use. Anytime a claim touches
my desk it gets added to the tracker. It is constantly open , which makes it a
wonderful visual aid for me.
One of the benefits of Excel is it makes searching for
specific things very easy (Ctrl-F) and it makes transferring information quick
and seamless (Ctrl – C and Ctrl – V).
After officially going paperless I can count on one hand how
many times I have printed, and you know what. That makes me feel good. I feel
like I am actively doing something that will affect the future.