Augusta Health Automates Document Routing with AI

4 days ago

4 min read

Augusta Health receives more than 750,000 documents a year. That's about 2.4 million pages, most of them by fax, and every page has to be reviewed, matched to the right patient and made actionable before care can move forward.

In a new article and video interview with Healthcare IT Today, recorded at MEDITECH Live, Augusta Health CIO Leigh Williams explains how her team is using AI automation in Forward Advantage's Document Workflow Platform to take that work off staff plates. Watch the interview above or read the full article.

The challenge: 2.4 million pages, sorted by hand

Augusta Health is a 255-bed community health system in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, with a hospital, four urgent care centers and a large clinic practice. The documents coming in include prescription refill requests, referrals and consult reports. Each one has to land in the right patient chart and be ready for the nursing, care management or provider team that needs to act on it.

"It seems strange in 2026 that we would be talking about documents," Leigh said. Augusta's process relied heavily on people, which she described as slow, tedious and error-prone. "It's just non-value-add time for our team."

Augusta isn't alone. Audrey Brislin, VP of Product and Marketing at Forward Advantage, explained in the interview that slow document handling delays the next step of care, holds up referrals and the revenue that comes with them, and creates risk. A document filed to the wrong chart is both a compliance problem and a quality-of-care problem.

Why Augusta chose Forward Advantage

Augusta Health and Forward Advantage have worked together since 1999. When Augusta prepared to go live on MEDITECH Expanse earlier this year, Leigh wanted a document solution that could support the workflows they'd relied on for the past decade, and also use AI "in new and novel ways."

That AI capability was the differentiator. "As we face financial headwinds and labor shortages, relying on people to do some of these more clerical, routine processes isn't the smartest for our organization," Leigh said. Augusta became an early adopter of the Document Workflow Platform's automation, and Leigh credited the partnership with Forward Advantage, including on the development of the new technology.

From manual indexing to automated document routing

In the Document Workflow Platform, incoming faxes appear on a dashboard organized by fax line, with each line tied to a clinic. Before automation, staff opened each document, entered its attributes and pushed it to Expanse, where routes filed it to the chart.

With AI automation, the platform reads the document, identifies what it is and routes it to the right place. "It really does feel like magic," Leigh said. "The AI takes that already decent process that does require some manual intervention and automates it, so that we're not spending any minutes or any labor on getting those documents to the right place."

Leigh measures success by what she calls "time to care": how long it takes from the moment a fax is sent until it's actionable in front of the clinician. "That really is what our patients need us to do: get that prescription refill really quickly or have that consult report back."

Understand your workflows before you automate them

One lesson from Augusta's rollout: automation works best when you understand your manual workflows first. Clinics and departments often categorize and file the same document type in different ways. "If you automate a process that's inconsistent, you're just scaling the problem," Audrey said.

That's why the Document Workflow Platform includes governance, audit and analytics tools. Hospitals can see how documents are filed today, find the best candidates for automation, and phase in AI only once there's enough confidence in a document type.

Not every document should be fully automated. Some types need a person to do a final check before anything reaches the chart. The platform lets each organization choose which document types are automated and which always keep a human in the loop.

The visibility alone changed things for Augusta. Before, some clinics had documents printing out of a fax machine. Now medical records leaders have one hub where they can see everything coming in, learn about referral patterns and track where prescription refill requests come from. They also use hold bins and work queues to manage documents that need a second review or an audit.

The impact on staff, stewardship and AI strategy

Staff have embraced the change. "Staff love it, because no longer are people having to spend their time to say, what is this piece of paper?" Leigh said. Demand is spreading across Augusta: when one clinic hears another has the automation, "it's pitchforks out in front of the office." Augusta's IT team has enjoyed the work too. "We don't often in health IT get to really fix something," Leigh said, calling document management "a longstanding, intractable problem."

The project also fits Augusta's stewardship goals as a community health system. Leigh emphasized that this isn't about eliminating jobs. It eliminates paperwork and frees team members to use their other skills, and she expects it to help retention. Faster referral processing matters too: "That's our engine," she said.

It also gives Augusta a clear answer to the question every CIO is asked about AI strategy. "This feels very safe, and it feels very impactful in the immediate moment," Leigh said. "This is a smart one. This is a good investment."

What's next

Augusta plans to automate as many document types as possible. Prescription refills are next: they come in at high volume, in a repetitive format the AI can learn easily, and they go to the same place every time. Augusta also plans to use what it's learning about its 750,000 incoming documents to improve its pathways to care.

Forward Advantage sees the platform growing beyond filing to the patient chart, routing documents to other areas of MEDITECH and to third-party systems as more integrations become available.