Santa Barbara Health Initiative is part of a statewide health care provider supplying services to the residents of Santa Barbara, California. Using a manual data entry system, Health Initiative was drowning in a sea of paperwork which prompted the need for an automated document management system.

Health Initiative receives nearly 1000 forms a day from its clients. These forms are mostly filled by hand and need to be key entered into a database application running on an HP 3000. Eight full-time indexing operators were required to manually input this information into the database application. After key entry, these forms were then filed into filing cabinets. When the forms are needed, they had to be searched and retrieved from the filing cabinets. It was not unusual to spend hours a day searching for forms when they were needed.

Health Initiative realized that the organization could substantially cut costs by implementing a document management system. For a system to meet their requirements, it had to be able to automatically file both images and text, and quickly retrieve documents. This would require the system to have optical disk based document management and optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Since OCR does not provide one hundred percent accurate results, manual validation for unrecognized characters was also necessary. The OCR process had to automatically recognize multiple types of forms that have been scanned. Due to the sensitive nature of the data on the forms, all the integration work had to be performed on-site. Jeff Santana, Director of Information for Health Initiative, evaluated a number of document management systems. Impressed by the customized document management system that Image-X has implemented at a number of locations, Health Initiative concluded that the Image-X system would be the most cost effective solution for their requirements.

THE SOLUTION

Image-X provided a distributed scanning, processing, indexing and retrieval system to take care of the forms processing and document management problem. The document imaging system is integrated with the existing Health Management application which is running on an HP 3000 computer and provides a comprehensive health management system for all branches. The components of the system include one scanning station, one optical character recognition and processing station, and one quality assurance station. The OCR-processed text is stored on an HP 3000 based health management application. The scanned documents are stored on a Hewlett-Packard optical jukebox with a capacity of 40 GB, connected to an HP 9000 computer. This provides an online capacity of nearly one million documents.

The forms are first batch scanned into the document management system using Fujitsu scanners. These scanned forms are at first stored on the local hard disk, to allow the scanning operator to rescan the documents if the quality is not good. After a batch of documents has been scanned, it's automatically forwarded to the optical character recognition (OCR) server. The OCR server processes the forms and sends the results to the quality assurance (QA) station for verification. The QA server is the only place where human interaction is required. The QA operator views the original images and the OCR process results on the QA station. The fields that are not verified are flagged by the software and displayed along with the original text. After the OCR-processed text has passed the quality assurance test, it is automatically sent back to the OCR server. The OCR server then transfers the scanned images to the optical jukebox attached to the image server. The recognized fields from the forms are used to update the database application running on an HP 3000.

Image-X's document imaging system provides document imaging and management solutions tailored to the needs of the customer. The components of the imaging system are modular and can be configured to provide a highly customized solution. The system is available on PCs, UNIX, OS/2 and Macintosh machines and can be integrated with any database application running on any kind of hardware platform. In addition to superior document management for millions of documents which results in fast search and retrieval speed, the unique indexing architecture automates the process to eliminate manual key-entry. The neural network based OCR allows automatic deskewing, forms recognition and line removal, and accurate OCR-processing which results in significant savings.

THE RESULTS

By using a completely automated process for optical recognition and indexing of scanned images, Image-X's solution avoided errors which may result due to manual data entry. The automated process allows Health Initiative to cut down on their cost of indexing and retrieving scanned documents. Storage requirements are also minimized. The Image-X system has completely eliminated the misfiling of documents. When specific forms are requested, they can immediately be printed out, while the original document resides safely within the optical disks.

The scanned forms can now be retrieved from any computer connected to the imaging server within a few seconds by just typing the forms identification number. Once the forms are displayed, they can either be printed or faxed out, thereby dramatically reducing response time. The scanned forms can also be retrieved using the existing application running on the HP 3000. By pressing just one key from the database application, the user can retrieve and display the scanned images associated with the database record.

By using their own application to search a scanned form, Health Initiative personnel did not have to learn a new database application, allowing them to immediately start using the imaging system.
The proven technology of Image-X once again provided a user friendly and easy solution for the Santa Barbara Health Initiative. No additional staff was required to support the imaging system, and existing employees were trained to use the system to Health Initiative's satisfaction.