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August 02, 2011

Saving lives with EHR

The efficiency and cost benefits of using electronic documents are hard to miss. Also, the security enhancements of digital images over paper-based communication are clear. But oftentimes, the benefits to the actual quality of healthcare–and even the potential to save lives–are overlooked.

ALAN SCHER ZAGIER
Associated Press / TheRepublic.com

The scattering of X-rays and medical records 75 miles away from a Joplin hospital destroyed by a tornado helped illustrate the destructive power of the storm that killed 160 people in May.

But the drenched and torn documents found near Springfield weren’t another disaster. They were back-up copies kept in the hospital’s archives after St. John’s Regional Medical Center switched to electronic patient records a few weeks before.

It’s a move taking place in a growing number of hospitals and doctors’ offices, bolstered by an Obama administration initiative that offered billions of dollars in federal incentives to upgrade technology — and one that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Monday likely “saved lives” in Joplin.

The former Kansas governor joined Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and other federal, state and local officials on a tour of the disaster site and recovery efforts.

“Think of a typical hospital waiting room, and the infamous clipboard where somebody is being asked to put together their medical history and prescription regime by memory, and add a huge traumatic incident on top of that,” Sebelius said in Associated Press interview later Monday. “There’s no question that … the availability of an electronic record may have actually saved lives. They were able to immediately go into the treatment phase and not spend a lot of energy trying to reconstruct (records).”

Roughly 20 percent of hospitals and 10 percent of doctors’ offices had converted to electronic health records before Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan in the summer of 2009 offered an incentive plan that could reach $27 billion over a decade, Sebelius said. Those participation rates have since doubled, she said, and will likely double again by the next update.

The effort was initially touted as a patient-centered means to eliminate mistakes in prescribing drugs, botching surgeries or making other costly mistakes. But the Joplin tornado offered a compelling example of the ease in which hospitals miles apart can quickly and securely share patient data, said Dr. Robert Belton, trauma director at St. John’s. On May 22, outlying hospitals treating tornado victims received medical records within hours, he said.

“Everybody here is a believer,” Belton said. “This has just made the recovery of patient care that much easier.”

Kathleen Sebelius Wikipedia.org

St. John’s continues to operate a mobile medical unit while its parent company, Sisters of Mercy Health System of St. Louis, finishes plans for a new medical center. Construction is scheduled begin next week on a sturdier temporary hospital — the mobile unit is essentially a massive tent — that will allow St. John’s to make it through the next two winters. The new medical center is expected to open in two years, with its location announced next week, Belton said.

Sebelius, who spent six years as governor of Kansas before joining President Barack Obama’s cabinet in 2009, is leading the administration’s effort to move doctors and hospitals to computerized medical records. Providers who don’t comply by 2015 face cuts in Medicare payments.

She also met Monday with Joplin’s school superintendent and reviewed plans for a childhood trauma center to treat the city’s youngest tornado victims.

Also Monday, Nixon said the state will pick up the 10 percent share of tornado debris removal costs not covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency under an expedited debris removal program that runs through next Sunday. The federal government is paying 90 percent of the cost in that area, instead of its typical 75 percent share.

August 01, 2011

Blazing the paperless trail

While we love to talk about new installations of CNG, it may lead you to wonder what it means for a company a bit farther down the path. Let’s look at an implementation after six years. What are they saying of the product now?

“I’m probably not too far off by saying that’s the reason we’re still in business.”

John Newlin
Quality Sprinkling System Services

As in many other cases, the main challenge is just being convinced that it’s the way to go. You can read the entire article at Lawn & Landscape, but the key points are clear: even in a business with hands-on installers who don’t have a lot of time to write detailed notes and indicate who had what document and for how long, the system provides lasting and measurable benefits.

The article goes on to discuss the problem of the backfile documents, but proposes a realistic and practical solution: make it a gradual process. They held on to documents for five years, and anything that wasn’t scanned was later reviewed and shredded.

July 13, 2011

Records storage: Is a new building the way to go?

Luzerne County officials are looking at bids to secure a new location for their records. According to CitizensVoice.com in an article written by Michael Buffer, the county hopes to improve their record storage situation, which currently includes such shortfalls as a $100,000 annual bill, a leaky roof, and an otherwise disorganized record-keeping system.

Options they are considering are building on vacant land and purchasing an existing building; however the former would result in a two-year delay to the project and the latter are proving to be outside of the budget of the county.

At Lehigh Gorge State Park, Pennsylvania; Rockport access. Wikipedia.org by John Pa.

It’s a staggering proposition, considering the amount of investment that would have been required to scan the documents and archive them electronically. The improvements to organization, security, and workflow efficiency alone speak to the wisdom of choosing to go digital, but truly, there is a point where a large back-file conversion would make time and money a consideration. When faced with the cost of a new building, who wants to also look into an electronic records management system?

The truth is that it’s never too late to start. While a relocation of existing paper documents may be a necessity, the sooner you start investigating the alternatives, the more likely that there won’t be another move in your future.

Are you planning to move a large amount of records to a new storage facility?
E-BizDocs can help make that move unnecessary.

July 12, 2011

Send me my receipt, and nothing else

If you’re standing in line to make purchase, get your email address ready. Sure, with the explosion of online activity throughout the decade, many retailers jumped quickly on the “May I have your email address” bandwagon, even as the many stylizations of the word (email, Email, e-mail) were bandied about. But new trends are making the question even more common.

Where can I send your receipt (and our email marketing)?

Stores are now offering electronic receipts in lieu of the bulky, prone-to-misplacement, paper standards. Of course, sending purchase records right to your inbox is a great idea, but as noted in this USA Today article, there are always naysayers:

“It’s a subtle way of saying, ‘How can I invade your personal life but not offend you at the same time?’ I’ve got to give them credit — it’s a pretty ingenious act.”

Britt Beemer, a retail analyst and founder of America’s Research Group.

The concept is far from “ingenious” and many light-years from nefarious as the above quote implies. The path of technology is widened and extended on a daily basis, and sending receipts via email is the obvious next step. And while there is no question that retailers would never overlook an opportunity to get more personal information, it’s not necessarily an invitation to blast-market them.

Any respectable store would have an ability to make (and abide by) a notation to a purchase record that while the customer would like the receipt electronically, they would not like to be subscribed to the mailing list. Maybe you can’t avoid the silent opt-in policy of a big store, but surely they would need to have easily accessible and visible tools to unsubscribe from future campaigns.

The bigger concern

What I find to be a more interesting angle is how a customer will easily communicate their email address in a culture that longs to scan, swipe, sign, and skedaddle.

“My email address? Sure. It’s bob, dash, the number 4. . . ” and so on and so forth.

Let’s throw in the portions of the public who still indicate capital letters and botch the TLD part of the email address and you see the greater complication. Will we see a return of the personal “calling card,” the predecessor to the business card as consumers produce one to easily communicate their email address? How about a bar code or QR code that makes their email address easy to access? And finally, will it be moot once it becomes commonplace to just “bump” a document over to a smartphone via bluetooth?

Would you request an electronic receipt via email?

June 15, 2011

Getting started with document management

As Todd Johnson of CDW/NetworkWorld states:

Time is money, and time spent searching for lost paperwork is money down the drain, as is money spent making unnecessary copies.

Todd Johnson
Getting started with document management

The Primary Benefits of Document Management

Continuing, Johnson covers the benefits of implementing a document management system, which fall right in line with our four pillars of document management: reduce cost, improve efficiency, ensure compliance, and mitigate risk. You can see how even though he expands into a little more detail, the concepts are the same:

Document management systems also offer businesses rapid return on investment (ROI) due to benefits such as:

  • Reduced costs associated with storing and retrieving paper documents and electronic content.
  • Reduced storage space, both physical and digital.
  • Improved operational efficiencies throughout the organization.
  • Improved security of electronic content and paper documents.
  • Enhanced business continuity (BC) capabilities in the case of a disaster.
  • Improved regulatory compliance.

In the article, Johnson covers all of the components necessary in a good electronic document management process, one that will bring all of the above benefits to your company.

If you don’t have time to read the whole article, make sure to bookmark it and return to it later when you have a chance to really absorb it. It’s good information.

Of the four primary benefits of an electronic document management system, which is most important to you? Efficiency, cost, compliance, or risk?

June 07, 2011

CNG-SAFE Receives High Marks with CPA Practice Advisor

CPA Practice Advisor has published a review of CNG-SAFE, the electronic document management software that has helped numerous companies reduce their paper workflow. In 2011, we helped Hoffman Car Wash with their installation of CNG-SAFE and several document scanners. You can read more about their story in this Business Solutions piece.

In the CPA Practice Advisor review, Technology Editor Isaac M. O’Bannon highlights how well-suited CNG-SAFE is to a CPA practice, evaluating the software on four criteria: core product functions and features, document workflow, document control, and special features. In each, CNG-SAFE scored 4.5 or higher for an impressive cumulative score.

What’s particularly interesting to us in this review is that Mr. O’Bannon notes the potential benefits to accounting firms as well as their clients:

CNG will fit in many different types of businesses, including, but not limited to, accounting and tax firms, as well as many of their clients.

This is important, especially in the accounting and financial vertical market. Not only is document sharing and integration exponentially improved for both parties, the fact that they can both share content in the same platform multiplies the benefit further.

CNG, the Alabama-based company behind the software solution, recently released CNG 7.

June 05, 2011

The Internet and the Pigeon

An old story, but an ongoing problem

If you haven’t heard the story about the Pigeon and the Internet from 2009, it would probably sound like an Aesop fable. In fact, it’s quite true, and it’s worth a listen.

You can research the history of homing pigeons on Wikipedia, starting with their first use in Egypt and Persia over 3,000 years ago. Their job persisted even until 2002 when it was announced that one of the last remaining, critical-use homing pigeons was to be retired, thanks to the Internet and the availability of high-speed data transfer.

But while most have abandoned the archaic modes of technology once regarded as efficient and superior, we may mistakenly assume the scope of saturation of the new, cutting-edge technologies we have grown accustomed to.

NPR’s Morning Edition reported on the story in South Africa, where a financial services company pitted a homing pigeon with a memory card against their Internet service in a modern-day version of John Henry’s competition with a steam-powered drill. Although in this case, the bird long-survived the task.

By the time Winston arrived at the data’s destination, 50 miles away, the Internet had managed to send only four percent of the information.

NPR.org

You can only wonder what the “estimated time remaining” alert on their machines was reporting.

Scott Baldauf of The Christian Science Monitor covered a more expanded account of the story, including the state of the Internet in general in South African countries, indicating that there would be improvement.

“A $650 million undersea cable, linking the Kenyan port city of Mombasa with a larger sea cable system servicing Asia, was officially activated in late July of this year, bringing most major cities in East Africa their first taste of high-speed broadband Internet.”

An Ongoing Situation

On July 3, 2011, Jennifer Baker of Pyramid Research published a piece on PRNewswire.com reporting their study that revealed how penetration of high-speed Internet in the continent is still developing, despite the progress spanning the last few years.

South Africa has begun initiatives in investing in technology and infrastructure, which will strengthen the country’s data backbone and will improve the offering of broadband Internet and data-related services, according to a new report from Pyramid Research (www.pyr.com).

While we take for granted that our data and information is there when we need it, we must remember, that in the global economy, we may still encounter vendors or customers who face challenges with regard to data transfer.

So what do you do when a distributed business does not have the infrastructure to support data sharing?

Follow Winston the Pigeon on Twitter

June 03, 2011

KODAK Capture Pro Software v3.1 Brings Additional Efficiencies to Enterprise Scanning Customers

Centrally administer Capture Pro Software across your network and enterprise.

Kodak recently released the latest version of Capture Pro Software, version 3.1. This release gives Network Edition users access to all of the features of the 3.0 release while adding new capabilities:

“KODAK Capture Pro Software v3.1 enables new and existing users of our recently released Network Edition to take advantage of all the powerful new features from the previous generation, including Microsoft® SharePoint Setup Wizard and Intelligent QC,” said Tim Mortenson, Worldwide Business Director, Software, Document Imaging, Kodak’s Business Solutions and Services Group. “With this release, Capture Pro Software brings added benefits in efficiency and applicability—to provide users cost effective and quick return on investment in operating across an enterprise—where there is a need to centrally manage and monitor multiple capture and indexing stations.” [hr] Source: Kodak.com

May 24, 2011

PDF/A-1 1A and 1B: A Difference Without a Distinction

Bill Lipner, President at Discovery Partners, Inc.

By Bill Lipner, LawyerPDF.blogspot.com

It turns out that the following information about PDF/A may be more than you need to know, but forewarned is fore-armed!

There has been a great deal of discussion about PDF/A as a specific PDF file format and some confusion about the two flavors of PDF/A.  PDF/A is subdivided into 1A and 1B – these are each referred to as a “Compliance Level”.   For legal practice the question at hand is whether a specific Compliance Level will be required by the Federal Courts under new rules for PDF/A format.  As you may recall, the Federal Courts will begin requiring that ECF documents be submitted in PDF/A format in 2011.  By the way, there is nothing preventing you from voluntarily filing in PDF/A format today.

PDF/A Compliance Levels:

The short description is:  PDF/A 1A is considered a “minimal” level of compliance with 1A including additional features for accessibility for reading disabilities.  PDF/A-1b (basic) is easier to generate and guarantees the visual reproducibility of content. (1)

Our friends at AIIM have very succinctly described the two Levels of Compliance as:

A few other key points are discussed at PDFA.org which I won’t recite here but are well worth perusing.

And Docs Corp has published a paper on the topic.

Which one should I use for ECF?

NARA
Perhaps a place to start is guidance from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) which sets records standards for the federal government.  From NARA FAQs:

4. Does NARA require a specific PDF/A-1 conformance level?
No. NARA does not require a specific conformance level for permanent PDF/A-1 records. Agencies should use the conformance level that best suits their business needs.  (3)

PACER
Perhaps PACER can give us some guidance as to which Compliance Level to use.  But alas,  Pacer doesn’t discuss PDF/A 1A or 1B – see this PACER announcement.  And from PACER personnel came the comment “We have been told either format will be accepted. There will be more information made available at each court’s ECF website when they begin to require the PDF/A format.”.

CONCLUSION
Short of specific instructions from your Federal District Court administrator, it seems that the distinction between PDFA 1A and 1B is moot.  1B Level Conformance is easier to accomplish and seems to win by default.

January 04, 2011

Document Scanning with a Cell Phone

Check out Best document scanning apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7, posted on the Australian Business Traveller website.

These applications address issues we encounter with general discussions regarding document scanning. Oftentimes, people may think of document scanning as just taking a picture. There’s quite a bit more to it, as a simple picture doesn’t allow for correction of edges or orientation, and the variation in image quality is greatly influenced by natural light, position of the document, and other things.

When a page is run through a document scanner, all that’s left is the content of the paper, with no border. The contrast and brightness is automatically modified to produce the best image possible to convey the data. These apps seem to be really moving in the direction of true document imaging rather than just capturing an image.

Source:
AUSBT.com.au