Health insurers such as Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealthcare are using Adobe EchoSign to enable doctors to sign contracts digitally.
Adobe
is working with doctors and insurers to bring about a paperless
contract-signing process through the company's EchoSign Web application. To
make contract signing less cumbersome,
EchoSign
enables digital signatures for doctors signing contracts with health insurance
companies.
EchoSign
allows insurers and physicians to automate the contract-signing process, and
physicians can sign digitally on an Apple iPad, iPhone, Google Android device
or a standard PC. All parties then receive the digitally signed document.
"Thousands
and thousands of physicians need to be signed up on to their provider networks
and managed through new contract relationships every month," Jason Lemkin,
vice president of Web business services at Adobe, told eWEEK. "It's a huge
task."
Insurance
companies are leading health care to digital signatures, according to Lemkin.
"Pretty
much everyone in this segment of health care is moving to Web signatures, and
they'll never go back," Lemkin said. "In a couple of years, nobody
will be using paper."
The
health care industry is hitting a "big inflection point" as far as
digital contracts, Lemkin noted. "We do everything else on the Web. Why
can't we do our contracts on the Web?" he said.
In
addition to signing contracts digitally, health insurers value the e-signature
technology for the ability to close deals with doctors quickly.
"Electronic
signatures aren't about putting an image of a signature into a document,"
Lemkin wrote in a
blog
post. "They're about closing deals on the Web, in as close to
real time as practical."
Before
using EchoSign, contract processing time for Aetna took three weeks. It now
takes a day on average, the insurer reports.
Although
EchoSign will become fully integrated into Adobe Reader later this year,
customers can also use EchoSign as a stand-alone product, Lemkin noted.
Since
every Windows PC and Android device has Adobe Reader installed on it, the
integration of EchoSign with the PDF application should bring mainstream use
for EchoSign, Lemkin predicted.
EchoSign
allows insurers to send mass mailings of contracts to doctors through email.
Doctors can sign using their finger on an iPad or an input device such a mouse
connected to a PC.
With
physicians
adopting tablets and smartphones in large numbers, 20 percent of all
EchoSign users sign documents on mobile devices, Lemkin said.
Aetna
launched its use of EchoSign on March 2, 2010, and Cigna announced its EchoSign
contract-signing process on April 20 of this year.
By
implementing EchoSign, Cigna hopes to make the contract-signing process quicker
and easier for doctors, the insurer reports. UnitedHealthcare is also using the
service.
"When
we started EchoSign we were doing a hundred contracts a month; now we're doing
over a million," Lemkin said.
"Paperless
contracts for health care and for health care insurance and physician networks
have pretty much entered the mainstream phases," Lemkin said.
Using
EchoSign, doctors can sign contracts through a secure Website and maintain an
audit trail and visibility for documents.
In
addition, EchoSign protects both the sender and the signer with key
authentication and privacy, fraud protection, and consumer disclosure,
according to Aetna.
On
Sept. 8, Adobe announced support for EchoSign in more than 20 languages.
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