Picture this: a large, integrated health system has dozens of employees devoted to manually indexing fax. Due to volume, they’re experiencing delays – from days to weeks to months. It’s hard to keep up between staff turnover, absences, changing schedules and other challenges. What’s the best way forward?
Our answer: eliminate manual process. Manual indexing isn’t scalable. Industry research shows it takes about 90 seconds to process a page, and that a worker can process 40 pages per hour. With an industry average of $18 an hour for an entry-level clerk, the math comes out to 45 cents a page. Multi-page documents accelerate that cost. For example, 100,000 pages translates into a labor cost of $45,000 plus burden. The costs multiply as the volumes go up.
The time to reimagine workflows is now
Faxes contain critical patient or financial data, insurance policies or private account setup data. All the data is required for a downstream process or workflow that drives business. Automating data entry is an easy way to consistently unlock all the critical information contained in your fax volume quickly, reliably and with minimal human intervention.
With the Great Resignation, the time has come for businesses to empower employees. Research from Forbes forecasts that ”70% of U.S. workers are planning to leave their jobs in 2023. Productivity is also falling at its fastest rate in nearly five decades as the “return to office” battle between employees and employers reaches a fever pitch. It’s time for HR and organizational leaders to face a hard truth: Work is never going back to the way it was.”
Employers can gain an edge by re-deploying workers from data-entry tasks to more mission-critical work. Now, more than ever, employees want to feel connected to their organization and that their contributions are valued.
Managing information end to end with fax
What does a typical healthcare fax capture workflow look like? It starts with capture which could involve scanning, faxing, removing an email attachment, or managing an inbound watch folder. It’s about moving content from one place to another. In a case where a fax contains multiple documents, capture also involves document separation, along with optical character recognition (OCR) and barcode or batch code recognition. OCR isn’t capture but it is a critical part of the capture process.
Quality control could include image enhancement, rotating pages, removing blank pages, or flagging pages with an error. The key is making sure all the content is available for the next step.
At the index stage, it’s all about data entry. This can be done manually, with employees looking at an image and keying in data or using semi-automated tools like rubber band or zonal OCR. Full on OCR and intelligent capture tools read the entire page’s content, identify the page type, and extract content based on knowing what the capture application expects to encounter.
The final step is release. The fax could be attached to an email and sent to the appropriate person, or it could be uploaded into a line of business system. These processes could be manual or automated depending on how the business has set up and implemented their index, capture, and workflow rules.
Many fax customers use a manual process to move the fax and the data to the next step, leading to disjointed and inconsistent results and delays. With automation, the workflow has been predefined. And the image and content automatically flow to the next step.
Unleash the power of data contained in faxes
Does your company have high fax volumes with dependent workflows? OpenTextTM Capture solutions can help streamline that fax data with automatic processing. OpenTextTM Intelligent Capture works seamlessly behind the scenes, freeing up employees to focus on more important things like customers, patients, clients, and revenue.
How does it work? Faxes flow directly from an input technology into RightFaxTM. Intelligent Capture sits downstream and ingests those images, performs the capture process and sends the image and data to the correct workflow based on the particular document type. From the company’s perspective, it’s all done automatically. Faxes go in, are correctly identified, and processed, then image and data come out, increasing the speed of business, and reducing time to revenue. Other benefits include improving the data quality, information sharing, and accuracy with less business risk.
Gain efficiency with OpenText Capture solutions
Manual paper-based data processing, error-prone data entry and an inability to run analysis reports in real time were major challenges facing Weight Watchers (WW) Group. With OpenText, they accelerated informed business decisions with automatic data capture and redeployed employees to other business critical tasks.
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Transform pixels into actionable information
Discover how OpenText™ can automate the capture of inbound fax data, accelerate workflow processes, and convert fax information into business-ready data. OpenText can help you modernize with HIPAA-compliant fax solutions to increase productivity and reduce costs.
