BUSINESS SYSTEMS & CONSULTANTS

“The Document Management People”

Business Systems & Consultants

113 Little Valley Court

Birmingham, AL 35244

Office: (205) 988-3300

Fax: (205) 985-9510

Providing document imaging services to its clients has been an important aspect of Business Systems & Consultants, Inc.’s (BSC’s) business model for most of the company’s 30-year history. Initially, these services consisted of micrographic conversion services, but today they more generally involve scanning paper documents into digital images. While BSC also integrates a wide range of hardware and software technologies to develop in-house imaging and document management solutions for customers, it is the company’s scanning service bureau that has been a hot commodity of late — particularly within the healthcare vertical.

“We have seen a lot of demand in the hospital market to outsource the scanning of patient records,” says Rick Romano, president of BSC. “Hospitals are looking to imaging technologies as a way to ensure the privacy and physical protection of patient information as required under legislation such as HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act]. However,

these organizations don’t want to invest in the high-end scanning equipment and manual labor necessary to digitize the several thousand or millions of pages of backlogged patient records they have on file.”

BCS expects to increase its revenue 15% this year by targeting hospitals with its scanning service capabilities. Considering that CBS Market Watch estimates that 90% of all patient information is still in paper form, you also have the opportunity to gain added business by targeting the healthcare market with document scanning services.

Ensure Proper Indexing To Deliver Error-Free Scanning Services
Developing a scanning service bureau that will attract healthcare clients takes more than just investing in several high-speed document scanning devices and equipment operators. In fact, the key to providing successful document conversion services begins before any scanning actually takes place by determining proper indexing schemes. The metadata used to index a file is the DNA of a document image and provides the information by which it can be searched and retrieved in a content repository. The accuracy of this information is crucial to all clients, but particularly hospitals. For example, if the patient records or medical record numbers the document images are indexed by don’t match the data that already exists in a hospital’s patient management system, then the electronic patient records will not be able to be reliably retrieved when uploaded into the system.

“We work with hospital HIM [health information management] directors and administrators to determine how they ultimately want to search and retrieve their document images before we take the first box of paper files to our facility for scanning,” says Romano. “During this consultation, we pinpoint the metadata and indexing schemes to be used for each document type contained in a patient record. We often work with hospital clients to obtain a download of the information already stored in their patient management databases. This allows us to cross-validate the metadata we capture during the scanning process with the information in the database, ensuring the integrity of the image indexes we create.”

Use Data Capture Software To Improve Scanning Services

Data capture software is instrumental in streamlining the indexing of document images a scanning service bureau delivers to customers. Business Systems & Consultants, Inc.’s (BCS’) scanning service bureau operates on the OCR for AnyDoc data capture platform by AnyDoc Software. OCR for AnyDoc was designed to work with every kind of document in every industry. The software achieves a 99.99% accuracy in extracting information from documents containing machine-generated print, handwriting, optical marks (e.g. checkboxes), and one- and two-dimensional bar codes. As OCR for AnyDoc extracts information, users can apply specific business rules to validate the data. Once the data is extracted and validated, questionable characters or fields are displayed for users to correct or accept. The final step is to create an ASCII file of the validated, corrected, and verified data from the forms for indexing purposes or further forms processing. All of this is performed with minimal human supervision and intervention.

AnyDoc has also developed a new software platform designed to eliminate much of the document preparation, sorting, and separating that can bog down and add manual labor to the scanning service process. AnyDoc CLASSIFY imports the scanned document images, automatically identifies and sorts them by document type, and recognizes any document sets (all pages related to a single document). AnyDoc CLASSIFY then routes these documents wherever they need to go — to defined directories for each type or to another application for further processing.

AnyDoc CLASSIFY automatically identifies, or classifies, documents based upon customizable keywords and document tags, and/or based upon the data found on each document. This capability eliminates the need for service bureau personnel to manually sort and insert separator sheets to identify different document types, reducing manual labor and accelerating scanning service turnaround times.

www.anydocsoftware.com