When it comes to document imaging, the hospital business office is special.  It requires a special solution.

Traditional imaging approaches will fall short in the business office.   There are several reasons why:

	The volume of documents processed by the office is large, yet the formats of documents vary enormously.
	Hospital business office documents can contain numerous, even hundreds, of account numbers on a single document.  They are index-dense.
	Online retrieval must be easy and fast.  The user must be able to locate a specific account quickly on the specific page where it occurs – even if the document is hundreds of pages long and contains hundreds of account numbers.

Traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is software that attempts to read and construct meaningful data (letters and numbers) from a document image.  OCR relies on pre-defined document zones where the reading occurs.  To increase accuracy, checksum information is often embedded within the data. 

Business office documents are received from a vast variety of sources.  It is unfeasible to configure OCR software with zones from every variety of EOB, Remittance Advice, and other document. Also, the use of checksum information is not an option.

Similar to transactions posting, indexing of hospital business office documents is labor intensive and requires attention to detail. OCR has never been used successfully as a postings solution. Indexing is no different.

Although effective in some applications, traditional OCR is unsuitable for the hospital business office.

Full-Text Search OCR is software that attempts to capture all recognizable text on a document (including all the text not related to account information).  As can be expected, it requires a huge amount of storage space, most of which is wasted.  There are two main problems with full-text search OCR:

1. Full-text OCR has the same problems as traditional OCR.

2. Even in the absence of those problems, searching for documents during document retrieval would be incredibly slow because of the huge amount of information stored.

A medical records imaging system will be problematic in several areas.

Medical records contain many pages for one account number.  Hospital business office documents (EOB's, RA's, etc.) can have hundreds of account numbers on just a few pages.  The fundamental index density of the documents is different.

Because of the nature of medical records, a medical records imaging system will be built for low-volume indexing.  A prohibitively large investment would be required in indexing and quality control staff to process business office documents with it.

Medical record documents originate inside the hospital system; business office documents originate outside the hospital, and create very different imaging challenges.

The required investment in staff combined with incompatibilities in application will not provide an adequate ROI.

There is not common agreement on what the phrase “Enterprise-Wide” means.  For some, it means an imaging system that is part of the hospital accounting system.  For others, it is some type of large stand-alone imaging system.

Imaging applications that attempt to use a “one size fits all” approach will fail for the business office, for the same reasons previously discussed. 

Imaging applications that require the end-user to index document images in a traditional manner are simply too expensive to staff.   Staffing requirements would be similar to those for transactions posting – both require the key-entry of a very large amount of account information as well as quality control staff.

In contrast to traditional approaches, Healthcare Reports services are specialized for the hospital business office.  Our staff, technology, and large service base enable you to surmount the unique challenges of business office document imaging, achieve high-performance retrieval, and realize the full potential of document imaging.