Document Scanning and Capture in Healthcare: Key Trends

Looking at the healthcare side, consider the Huntington Internal Medical Group (HIMG) is Huntington, West Va. HIMG is a major regional medical provider with more than 60 licensed internists specializing in disciplines ranging from cardiology to endocrinology, gastroenterology, oncology, and pulmonary diseases.¹

Until recently, HIMG was like most doctors’ offices—reliant on myriad paper documents to conduct business with patients, other physicians, administrators, insurance companies, governments, and other entities. By going paperless with scanners in both back-office and front-office operations, however, the practice reduced document management staff from 17 full-time employees to four; eliminated four storage rooms, and several thousand square feet of offsite storage space for a combined annual savings of approximately $500,000 per year.

HMIG, however, is an unusually large practice, and thus able to achieve economies of scale unrealizable for smaller healthcare operations.

There is also an undeniable, industry-wide lust for “going-paperless” in pharma, which is one of the largest tree-munching industries worldwide, as reported in considerable length in the cover-story package of the July/Aug 2009 Infonomics magazine, in which one industry writer reports that “Going electronic requires getting control of your processes. You can’t use your paper processes to operate an automated system.”² The stories do not, however, make specific reference as to what gains can be achieved through scanning and capture versus electronic document management.

Nonetheless, recent AIIM research reveals that capture and scanning are very much a growing trend in healthcare and pharma in general³. In this study, the term “capture” refers to the combined processes of document scanning, image correction, recognition of text barcodes, form fields, etc., and, finally, output to an appropriate format for subsequent processing or archive storage.

Traditionally, scanning and capture has been considered technically challenging, but more reliable and capable scanners, more automated capture processes, and in particular, the availability of a multi-function scanner/print in almost every office has led over the last five to six years to a new model of distributed scanning, local to the office staff processing the documents. In some scan-to-archive applications, particularly in healthcare, a scanner-per-desk policy can be viable.

The study revealed 19 general findings across 17 market segments polled. Among them:

• Centralized, in-house scanning and mailroom scanning are set for a considerable growth compared to outsourced scanning and capture.
• 78 percent of those surveyed have some form of distributed scanning via multifunction peripherals, desktop scanners or branch-office scanners.
• Knowledge management in the form of improved searchability of business documents is the highest driver for scanning, closely followed by compliance and business process improvement.
• The biggest drawback of distributed scanning is training staff to index properly and maintain quality of indexing over time.

Drilling down into healthcare and pharma respondents, however, we can see the most salient trends in these industries:

• A full 76 percent of healthcare respondents, primarily from North America and Europe, reported that they do not outsource any scanning and/or capture services, while 57 percent from similar regions in pharma reported that they do outsource.
• The return on investment for purchase of in-house scanning and capture is impressive in healthcare, in which 50 percent of respondents reported ROI within 12 months, while an additional 18 percent reported ROI within 18 months. The respective totals for pharma, however, are not as rosy, with only 30 percent reporting ROI in 12 months and an additional 20 percent in 18 months.
• 72 percent of healthcare respondents, primarily from North America and Europe, agreed that “Records security and accessibility (compliance)” was the strongest driver for scanning and capture, while 77 percent of pharma from similar regions reported that improving “searchability/findability of business documents (knowledge management)” was the strongest driver. 
• The two largest drivers for using outsourced services in pharma were 67 percent for both “cost per scan” and “No staff management overheads,” while these were also the two strongest drivers in healthcare, which reported 70 percent respectively in both categories. 
• Healthcare respondents reported “closer integration with the process” (53 percent) as the biggest benefit for centralized, in-house scanning/capture, while the strongest driver for pharma (60 percent) was “better process knowledge for entry and indexing.”
• “Ownership by local process owners” was reported as “the biggest benefit from distributed scanning” in both industries, with healthcare and pharma reporting 50 percent and 62 percent respectively. • SharePoint uptake: 62 percent of healthcare respondents reported storing “scanned images and electronically generated files in the same system,” but with a full 72 percent reporting they do not “index and store significant numbers of scanned images in SharePoint.” Those figures were 56 percent “yes” and 67 percent “no” respectively for pharma respondents.
• 58 percent of healthcare respondents said they do not use automatic classification for archiving, while an even greater number – 67 percent – of pharma agreed.

Footnotes:
1. See the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of Infonomics magazine, “Conversion to Electronic Health Records at a Large Medical Practice . 

2. See the July/Aug 2009 issue of Infonomics magazine, “In Search of ‘Paperless’ Clinical Trials.”

3. AIIM “Industry Watch” market intelligence report, “Document Scanning and Capture: local, central, outsource – what’s working best?” The survey was taken by 882 individual members of the AIIM community in November 2009, using a Web-based tool. Invitations to take the survey were sent via email to a selection of the 65,000 AIIM community members. Find under the “Research” menu on the AIIM homepage at www.aiim.org. Scroll down to the “Industry Watch” tab.