Open Enrollment puts healthcare operations under scrutiny. As teams handle enrollment-related documentation and coverage questions alongside ongoing administrative work, delays and manual workarounds can become harder to absorb.
This may be a difficult time to introduce new technology. It is also an opportunity to identify where your document infrastructure struggles to keep pace, and what should change before the next busy period.
We Asked, Healthcare Executives Answer
Retarus’ 2026 survey of US healthcare leaders revealed a persistent gap between the adoption of electronic tools and the manual work required to keep documents and requests moving.
For healthcare teams, that work can repeat throughout the day. Each task may take only a few minutes, but together they consume time that digital systems were supposed to save. When demand increases, those same tasks can become operational bottlenecks.
The report, The Administrative Work Hidden Inside Healthcare Document Exchange, explores where that work accumulates and what healthcare organizations should examine more closely. Here’s what was found…
The time spent between systems adds up
Fax remains part of document exchange across healthcare organizations, connecting offices, systems, and external partners. But when delivery, routing, and follow-up are disconnected, staff absorb the extra work.
of survey respondents spend five or more hours each week managing or reworking fax-related exchanges.
That work extends beyond sending documents. It can include investigating failed transmissions, resending records, checking separate inboxes, and matching incoming documents to the appropriate request.
During large yearly waves of added volume, such as Open Enrollment, watch for where these tasks begin to accumulate. Are documents waiting because transmission capacity is limited, because routing requires manual intervention, or because staff cannot easily confirm what happened?
Those are different problems, and understanding which one is slowing the workflow is essential to choosing an effective solution.
Where does a stalled document become visible?
A missing attachment may first come to light when someone follows up on an authorization. An incomplete referral may remain unresolved until scheduling needs it. Several departments may investigate the same issue before anyone identifies where the process stopped.
This raises a practical question for healthcare leaders: Can your teams see where a document workflow has stalled, or do they find out when someone starts chasing it?
Looking at that question across IT, administrative operations, and clinical teams can reveal work that individual system metrics miss. Open Enrollment provides an opportunity to document those gaps as they occur: where queues build, which issues trigger repeated follow-up, and how teams keep work moving when existing processes fall short.
Reducing administrative effort starts with understanding where people still have to intervene. As your teams work through Open Enrollment, useful questions include:
- Can your fax infrastructure handle increased volume without delays or additional oversight?
- Where do staff leave their primary application to check delivery or request status?
- What triggers a resend, a phone call, or a manual escalation?
- Who takes responsibility when a document fails or arrives incomplete?
- How much time goes into resolving the same issue across departments?
You do not need to launch a migration during Open Enrollment to begin building the case for improvement. Tracking recurring issues now can help establish priorities and requirements for your next infrastructure review.
Those observations can also clarify what to look for in a solution: capacity that accommodates changing demand, delivery status visible within existing applications, and routing and recovery processes that require less manual effort.
Use what you learn during Open Enrollment to identify where your document workflows need to improve.Download the full report to see where else Healthcare leaders saw gaps in their workflows, and where they prioritize investment: The Administrative Work Hidden Inside Healthcare Document Exchange.
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