Email with attachments to ECM

Some vendors will want to create invoices or patient information in electronic form, such as PDF. They will want a email address to send it to as an attachment. There are many aspects to consider when automating the processing of email with attachments:

• Setting up the email account (who has access, gets notifications, what listener to set up)
• Rules for routing the email based on subject content, from address, body of the email
• Whether or not to store the email body
• Determining the attachment's contents: one page per attachment, all together? Different PO's in one batch?
• Whether to split up the attachment
• Classification of the attachment: who is it from?
• OCR of email body and attachment(s)
• Advanced capture on the attachment to automatically index the page based on PO# for example

For each of the above aspects there are many finer details, but it is clear that this type of interchange of information is not ideal. For one, it would be better to setup a formatted xml file which describes all of the attachments, their PO# or Account#, the basic metadata of each file such as invoice number, total amount, vendor name, or for healthcare MRN, Patient Name, date of birth, etc. There's room for improvement and eventually this type of communication will be much accurate.