Is scanning right for you?
Scanning technology made huge strides over the last 20 years. Scanners are now often present in people’s homes much like appliances. As a result many of us take for granted the ability of companies to replace paper based business process with managing digital records in a streamlined way. This question always comes up when we get to the doctor’s office and witness paper files being moved around. So why is it that we do not see paperless offices everywhere yet?
I have been around process automation and digitization technologies for some time. I often find that when businesses decide to digitize their records they are often ill prepared for the effort that goes into it, both in the design and development process and in the actual day to day operation. Here are several factors to consider.
1. Scanning, imaging and content capture solutions
Scanning solutions offer a wide range of functionality that requires multifaceted expertise and involvement of many different parties to make it successful. Most of enterprise oriented scanning and imaging software today offers distributed scanning environment with multiple servers and clients spread over the corporate network. This means that corporate IT needs to be involved in order to provide hardware and software environment, manage the installation process, participate in the design and integration of the software and also support users on an on-going basis. Whole host of other people from the business community needs to be involved to define requirements, participate in design and testing of the proposed solution. And in most cases consultants get involved in the actual design and implementation phase that require their expert skillset.
2. Solution design
In our home scanning experience all we have to do is place a document on the scanner, run it through and save the resulting file somewhere we can easily find it after giving a file meaningful name. I am sure some people quickly forget where they stored their files and have trouble finding them. In case of legal documents with potential high volumes going through a medical office or a hospital this is not really an option. In order to have a successful way of scanning multiple documents there should be an easy way to classify, i.e. categorize these documents automatically. When you talk about hundreds or thousands of records this can get a bit tricky.
Modern software uses page separators to automatically identify the documents. These separators can be completely dumb or very intelligent depending on the design work that goes into them. For example, such separator can identify only a document type based on the bar code it carries. In simplistic case one can identify as many separator types as there are document types. For example, your consent form or marked up blood work form can each have a predefined separator that will be used to identify them. ON the other hand, we can design an intelligent form that will contain the medical record number, patient name, provider name and other pertinent information. In this case the form itself carries the identification.
Making decisions on how these forms or separators should be designed, what information should be captured automatically, how to use bar codes, what fields should be there, whether to use or not to use optical character recognition (OCR) requires good understanding of the available options and the effort that will go into making any of these options work. This is not an easy challenge because different choices will typically lead to various levels of manual effort. For example, if the data entered by hand on the form is important, OCR may be used to read the data. However, this requires a certain repeatable design pattern as well as programming of the form in order to let the software know which fields will need to be OCR-ed. This increases the cost of implementation. On the other hand, we can decide that we only want to be able to search these documents by the two main fields such as MRN and date of service and leave the rest of it only as an image without recognizing the text itself. This will make implementation much easier but will involve entering some of the data manually and limited search capabilities.
3. Sorting
Depending on the design decisions more or less sorting is involved in preparing the records for scanning. If dump separators are used, more sorting is involved. For instance, if dumb separator is used to identify the document type, operators will need to separate paper files by document type prior to scanning. On the other hand if all the forms are intelligent and self identifying, almost no sorting is necessary.
4. Image identification or Indexing
Indexing is a process of entering the data from the scanned documents that was not automatically identified during the scanning. This implies using workers to read and manually enter the data into the system in order to enable search by these parameters. The more indexing is involve the more manual the whole scanning process gets. It also means that scanned images will not be available in the system until the indexing is completed.
5. Image routing
After images are processed through scanning and indexing, the question is - where do they go? Most companies do scanning to allow the data identifying the images to be available via some easy to use user interface. But before they reach their final destination these files may need to be reviewed, approved or routed for some other reasons. This often involves content management, workflow or business process management applications to be integrated with the image capturing solutions. On top of that ability to find and display these images in the right context is a very important aspect of the overall solution. We are talking portal integration or whatever other client the organization is typically using.
6. Paper archiving
And what do we do with all this paper now that it was scanned? Many companies cannot get rid of the paper files right after scanning for either legal or trust issues. So paper file piling continues even after the scanning solution is implemented.
In this entry I tried to explain the complexitities of implementing true entrprise content capture, scanning and imaging solutions.If you have questions, please contact me directly.
Valery Zelixon
Comments: 0; Published: May 10, 2011; Permalink
Tags:
content capture,scanning
