Fax to Email to ECM

Fax cloud services make it easy to convert fax transmitions into email and attachments. These attachments can TIF or PDF and the email can include a cover sheet. This service eliminates the need to use a traditional fax machine altogether.

The trick is integration with your ECM. Hyland's OnBase subscription service allows you to poll an Outlook inbox form incoming emails. Once an email comes in, the service imports the email's body and attachment. It will import both as seperate doc types and then if necessary place the files in a scan queue. This automates the manual email and importing steps in the invoice process for example.

Aspects to consider

Gather requirements around how to route incoming faxes. For example, typically a department like accounts payable will have on inbox which caters to multiple types of requests. In order to route and organize the incoming invoices vs. complaints vs. receipts vs. backup documentation, rules need to be put in place. These rules should start at the inbox level. This means breakout the major types of the incoming emails, for example, invoices and backup docs. Then look at common values in the email's subject, to and from, and body text. Each of these will help tag incoming content with pertinent metadata.
 

Fax to ECM

Many companies still rely heavily on faxing paper for accounts payable, legal transactions, and signed documents for finances and medical records. These docs consume a lot of paper just to end up being scanned into a document management system. The metadata associated with the documents gets lost every time it is faxed and has to be recreated on the other end manually. This manual process is time consuming and costs a lot of money in the long run.

Document Templates

Laying out a document's design to conform to the way fax machines and scanners read and recognize characters on the page is crucial to get to the next steps in the pathway to fully electronic transactions. The template must be consistent and have distinct features that set it apart from other documents. If there is a logo or header be sure to place it within the margins of the page far enough to that the shifts in the scanner do not sometimes cut it off. This unique identifier will come in handy at the advanced capture stage of scan capture. If the document is an invoice, design it to print out the line items on one line, or within a fixed box per line. This again will help with recognition. If the document is a form with boxes, make the boxes large enough so as not to cut off any data that is printed into them, such as, a date or vendor name. Scanners do not read words with lines between them very well.

Fax Configuration

Make sure the resolution of the scanner's printing is as good as possible. If there are blotches or spots that characters will not be read as well as expected.

 

Paper to scanner to ECM

The first step to automating the processing of paper is throwing it in a scanner and indexing it. Most companies that deal with paper invoices either have this technology or want it. Scanning and manually indexing the image file produces a document and metadata that is usually stored in some type of content management system. As more departments hear about the scanning in AP, they will want to acquire scanners and start processing that way.

The folks involved with preparing paper and scanning grow comfortable with this paradigm. Depending on the industry and type of document, the scanner and IT sides are more than likely looking for ways to expand the scanning aspect of the solution vs. requiring that vendors and form designers think about the many identification, character recognition, and indexing issues to stream efficiency.

Instead of forcing outside vendors and print shops to deal with issues of accuracy and formatting, many scanners and managers are happy to keep certain personnel busy, thus justifying their jobs and their departments.

What suffers with this status quo mentality is the ECM solution. The ECM software can be very good, however, it is only as good as the information coming in. This is the initial configuration of documents and minimal descriptions associated with them. The real power of ECM is force to lie dormant as learning and budgets grow to realize better, more accurate solutions.

So, how to light a fire under the very department that was created to solve the paper issues? As you get comfortable with scanning, the issues of accuracy and automatically capturing more information start to reveal themselves. More on this in the next blog…

Pathways to No Paper

There are infinite approaches to trying to eliminate paper. I have been involved with many of them and look forward to trying whatever technologies come in the future. Right now and probably forever, it's an integration game between old and new technologies. The following are some of the pathways to ECM. In future blog entries, I will tackle these in detail:

• Paper to scanner to ECM
• Fax to ECM
• Fax to email to ECM
• Email with attachments to ECM
• Fax to directory to ECM capture disk sweep
• Index to QA to ECM
• Barcode to index to QA to ECM
• Capture to QA to ECM
• Modify paper forms to suit needs of capture and barcode
• Modify paper forms to suit needs of web forms
• Web forms to ECM
• ECM forms
• Mobile forms

Spinning Sensation of IT Projects

It seems like IT departments go round in circles revisiting the same issues of projects over and over again. As you go around again and recognize the same issues, will you have enough energy to tighten the circle so that next time and issues are less? The spinning of project issue repetition is a symptom of lack of a comprehensive understanding of information and technology interaction. This spinning does not happen overnight, it builds up slowly as more projects are retrofitted into system as a whole.

More integration headaches equal less vision of information architecture. Why is this? Because someone said we need to consolidate system X with system Y without thinking through the issues of having corrupt information. Information’s worth is how well it is connected, but what happens when connections change leaving orphaned content and obsolete metadata? Nothing happens until someone says, “Let’s safe money by consolidating” or integrating or adding functionality, etc.

How does IT stop the spinning of issues?

At the core of any spiral, you don’t spin, but you see everything that is. With this perspective you can understand the forces at work, for example, a department that is feeding the spin by adding content that is not described accurately and extensively enough-rotation is increased. At the core, you can see this by analyzing reports which show trends. Also, anytime you think through how to export a cross section of your content and information you will expose the issues which cause your dizziness. The export exercise can be a low cost way to analyze how well the information architecture is designed. For example, does the information make sense on its own, are standard descriptive terms used to describe the content, are there accurate dates of execution of the information, could it be accurately imported into another system?

Techniques to pitch your innovative ideas in IT

You have an approach to an issue with the design or flaw in a system. You brought up the idea with your project manager who dismissed it immediately without considering the whole possible solution. You know your idea has merit. You know your idea could work, but how do you convince your peers and managers, how do you persuade them?

Persuasion is a skill that, when coupled with perseverance, will help implement your idea. Of course, your idea has to be good and well thought out. Many people have better persuasion skills than ideas and that’s part of the problem with IT these days: many project managers have other agendas that diminish the technical integrity of the solution. Solution flaws come back to haunt you if you let them slide because of the pressures of timelines in the present. Have some guts and make your case now or suffer the consequences!

Plant the seed, add water

Bring up your idea and be aware of the reaction. If the reaction is dismissive, don’t try to convince at that point. Let the idea work its way into the doubting minds. In the meantime, build your argument. Let’s say a few other ideas are brought up and tried, but ultimately fail. Your idea may be brought up by the person who dismissed it a few days ago. If this happens, try not to feel discouraged as ideas are cumulative and no one person deserves full credit.

Try/Buy

If the idea you have involves software, see if it is available on a trial basis. If so, install the software and configure it. Build a proof of concept. The best way to convince your management that your idea is a good one is to show it in action.
 

Gather consensus

Your ability to persuade individual members of the team could be crucial to getting your point across. The more team members that are convinced, the better chance of actually getting your innovative idea recognized.

Let other ideas fizzle out, be patient

If you are patient the inferior ideas will eventually be proven faulty. Reintroduce your idea and witness how it is accepted. There are many reasons that folks reject ideas at first. It would take all your energy to figure them out. Your job is to know that your idea is the best and to persevere.

Some Myths of Big Data

After Lawrence Hart recommended "The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun, I was curious to find out what Mr. Berkun's ideas were on innovation. The book starts out with the concept of the years of hard work it takes for our innovative breakthroughs to occur; that the moment of genius is a surprise after many long hours and infinite combinations of possibilities.

As we consider "Big Data" and its promises of indexing and searching "innovation", I wonder how of this is marketing and how much is making a "significant positive change"? Big Data in healthcare has a long way to go before it can truly state that it works. What the Big Data push is doing is forcing the architects of the first generation of EMR designs to rethink how their data is designed, OCR for scanned results and forms, metadata of content, designs of the forms online and on paper, merging of transfer patient encounters, and the use of acronyms, keywords in forms. This is just a short list of hurdles that will need to be dealt with before Big Data can be fully useful.

Bad Data in EMRs

Indexing inconsistent and spotty information makes it easier to search, but the results would still need a lot of clean up. In other words, EMRs will need to be fully combed through and corrected to produce accurately results. One issue with EMRs is that the underlying organizational structures are hard to change because of the audits and regulations that control these changes. Also, when hospitals merge, older record numbers get merged in with newer one; at the master database level the numbers are unique, however at the patient record level all sorts of interesting things can happen where duplicates number occur and short term fixes are put in place...

Some EMRs allow for free text to be entered as metadata which describes the electronic or scanned in form; great, but have you ever tried to pull any type of consistent meaning out of these free text fields? What were they thinking??

Optical Character Recognition (yep, ICR and OMR too)

For hospitals that are not fully electronic, most of them, the issue of scanning and OCR'ing their forms and results is an ongoing struggle in that the forms and inconsistently filled out, doctors and nurse hand write their notes, and the design of the forms paper oriented. The technology behind ICR for hand writing is not good enough for recognition unless the hand written letters have boxes around them.

So, as Big Data permeates healthcare systems, at what point will it really help to bring about "significant positive change"? There are many years of hard work to get this point. If you drink the koolaid, index agents can intelligently sift through all of the noise and help find and report on the information that is required for upper management dashboards, however, I believe there will be many cycles of "reforecasting" Big Data effectiveness before it is ready for primetime.