Cutting down on paperwork without going paperless

APPLICATION: A new data capture and document processing solution has streamlined a community care provider’s paper-based processes, cutting administration time by 20 per cent.

Konica Minolta 1APPLICATION: A new data capture and document processing solution has streamlined a community care provider’s paper-based processes, cutting administration time by 20 per cent and eliminating the need to store hard copy files.

Clinical Care Professionals, a provider of home nursing and aged care services in Adelaide, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, uses a paper-based documentation system to monitor the services provided to clients as an affordable and easy-to-use system.

A folder kept in the client’s home contains standardised forms that staff fill in and clients sign whenever work is done, with the forms periodically returned to head office for processing.

Clinical Care Professionals co-founder and co-director Carolyn David said the process used to be labour intensive and resulted in multiple iterations of forms in different places, as well as boxes of paperwork that needed to be put into the system manually and then stored.

“It was creating a lot of extra work and using up a lot of storage space,” Ms David said.

Since automating the most time-consuming parts of the process, the provider is saving roughly one day per week of administration time, she said.

The process has been automated using ABBYY FlexiCapture, which is designed to turn documents into digital business-ready data, in combination with a new multifunction printer that can scan more than 50 documents at a time from Konica Minolta, which suggested the data capture and document processing solution.

“With the new Konica Minolta multifunction device, we had the ability to scan stacks of documents, so it made sense to go that extra step and incorporate the ABBYY FlexiCapture solution. This can identify and digitise specific form-based information and send it directly to other business systems for archiving and operational purposes,” Ms David said.

The provider also redesigned forms to make them easy for the system to read and extract information from, and implemented a barcode system that involves adding an identifying sticker to client forms. As a result, the system reads the files and automatically sorts information into client ID, document type, and date order, and adds the care details to clients’ digital files.

“With the new solution in place, all administrative staff have to do now is ensure the forms are correctly labelled with the ID sticker and positioned in the right way for the scanner to extract the data,” Ms David said.

“Once a sample of three or four processed forms has been double checked to make sure the digitised information is correct, we can place the documents into the confidential waste bin for the contracted document company to collect and destroy rather than having to store it in secure archiving boxes for years.”

After the information has been stored digitally, it is backed up, and because there is now greater control over management and access of the records, the ISO quality management accreditation is much easier to maintain, she said.

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Tags: ABBYY-FlexiCapture, Carolyn-David, Clinical-Care-Professionals, Konica-Minolta, news-tr-3,

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