How Valerie Health Eliminated Tedious Patient Paperwork with VLM Run

Scaling Back-office Operations in Healthcare with VLMs

Healthcare back-office operations face a universal challenge: processing vast amounts of unstructured patient documents efficiently and accurately. From patient-intake forms to insurance cards, from medical history records to referrals, these documents come in countless formats, often as low-quality scans, faxes, or handwritten forms.

Valerie Health, a fast-growing AI-powered healthcare operations company, was wrestling with this exact challenge. Their document processing relied on a complex patchwork of OCR tools, custom scripts, and manual quality assurance — a setup that was becoming increasingly unsustainable as they scaled.

That's when they turned to VLM Run, a developer-friendly Visual AI solution that transforms unstructured documents into structured JSON through a single, unified API.

The Problem: Traditional Document OCR and LLMs Fall Short

Prior to implementing VLM Run, Valerie Health's engineering team juggled multiple solutions: various document formats, off-the-shelf OCR tools, duct-tape OCR + LLM implementations, and custom EMR integrations – requiring significant engineering resources to maintain.

Showcase of the various intake forms that Valerie Health's engineering team had to deal with - poor handwriting, varied layouts, and low-quality scans make this a challenging problem for traditional OCR solutions.

Traditional OCR solutions worked adequately for pristine digital documents but faltered with real-world healthcare paperwork. Attempts to enhance OCR with LLMs introduced data accuracy issues and hallucinations that required extensive manual verification. Their engineering team found themselves building increasingly complex systems of heuristics and post-processing rules just to map extracted text to the correct EMR fields.

The Solution: Why Valerie Health Chose VLM Run

Valerie Health needed a solution that could handle the complexity of healthcare documents without the traditional overhead. VLM Run delivered exactly that — a production-ready Visual AI platform that transformed their patient-intake document operations with a single, unified API. Here's how:

Unified API for All Document Types

Rather than maintaining multiple OCR solutions and custom integrations, Valerie Health now uses a single, unified Document to JSON API for all their document processing needs.

• Unified handling of scanned, handwritten, and faxed documents

• Seamless adaptation to new document layouts and formats

• Reduced infrastructure costs and maintenance overhead

Structured Data & Enterprise-Ready Compliance

VLM Run's healthcare-optimized models don't just extract text — they understand document context and deliver structured data aligned with Valerie Health's systems with enterprise-ready compliance:

• Direct JSON outputs mapped to their EMR schema

• HIPAA and SOC-2 Type-2 compliant processing

• Built-in confidence scoring to prevent hallucinations

• Automated validation and visual grounding mechanisms

Developer-First Implementation

What impressed Valerie Health most was the speed to production. Their team went from evaluation to live deployment in under two weeks:

• Simple REST API with clear documentation for image or document inputs

• Trivial integration in under 5 lines of code

• Production-ready security, scaling and fine-tuning capabilities

The result?

A modern document ETL pipeline that "just works," allowing Valerie Health's engineering team to focus on their core product instead of maintaining complex Visual AI infrastructure:

A quick example of VLM Run's Document to JSON API in action -- we render the JSON to make it easier to visualize the underlying structure of the JSON that Valerie Health's engineers can now use to directly integrate with their EMR.

Transforming Healthcare Operations with VLM Run

Valerie Health's transition to VLM Run delivered immediate and measurable improvements across their document processing pipeline.

Here are a few remarks from Valerie Health's CEO on the experience of using VLM Run:

"Turning typed or handwritten referrals into structured information is a long-standing problem in healthcare. As part of our referral management solution, VLM's OCR technology saves time and money. This is saving our customers thousands of hours of time and ensuring our patients get good quality care." - CEO

Ready to modernize your healthcare document processing?

Valerie Health's success demonstrates how modern Visual AI can transform healthcare operations. By replacing complex OCR systems with VLM Run's unified API, healthcare tech companies can now process diverse document types with unprecedented accuracy while maintaining strict compliance standards.

Schedule a demo or contact Sales at sales@vlm.run to learn more.