Prepress

PMI Health Group automates data capture using a Kodak i4600 production scanner and PSIGEN Software solution

Tuesday 14. May 2013 - Kodak announces today that PMI Health Group, the UK's largest independently owned provider of employee healthcare & risk management services, has installed a Kodak i4600 production scanner as part of an OCR and data capture solution to digitise paperwork and capture information automatically from invoices, statements and insurance renewal documents.

The new capture and scanning solution – delivered by reseller partner, Datafinity – streamlines document indexing into a variety of enterprise management systems including Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Sun Accounts.
PMI Health Group brokers individual and business insurance plans for employees and deals with 62 insurers, offering nearly 160 insurance policy types, across 14 separate markets. Founded in 1986, the company is based in Northwich, Cheshire and currently employs 142 staff. A team of 20 occupational health advisors, consultant physicians and registered nurses help companies to cut the cost and incidence of sickness absence.
PMI Health Group scans an average of 800 documents per day and needed an affordable and easy-to-use solution to automate document capture and handle semi-structured documents such as healthcare provider invoices as well as structured documents including financial statements and application forms. For both types, the ability to extract line item information was also required and the solution had to be scalable as PMI Health Group plans to expand the use of document and data capture over time.
Across the organisation, data from paper documents and incoming PDF files had to be transferred into the company’s accounts, customer information (CRM) and document management systems. Although PMI Health Group was already scanning some documents, the process of indexing in SharePoint was very labour intensive and time consuming.
Having reviewed a number of technologies, PMI Health Group chose PSI:Capture Enterprise from PSIGEN Software because of its extensive OCR capabilities and wide range of connectivity options to backend business systems, in particular, Microsoft SharePoint integration.
The PSI:Capture system was installed and configured to scan and extract data from a range of key documents, like invoices, statements and insurance policies. The data extracted from them is then matched against the accounts and CRM databases for validation and to retrieve additional indexing information to allow a full-text PDF of the documents to be stored and indexed in SharePoint for easy retrieval. Client account information captured from renewal statements, for example, is also updated in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Header and line item data extracted from supplier statements is exported to a Microsoft Excel file for use by the accounts department. Additionally, a Microsoft Outlook email extraction utility was also installed to automatically save relevant PDF attachments to the file system for automated processing by PSI:Capture.
Document scanning is carried out by a high speed Kodak i4600 production scanner which was chosen because of its reliability and ability to easily handle a variety of paper sizes and thicknesses without jamming.
Andy Dawson, director of reseller Datafinity, says, “Our experiences of Kodak i4600 production scanners have been excellent and we’ve used them on a variety of projects. The i4600 is compact, quiet, delivers high quality scans and is attractively priced which makes it a premium low volume production scanning solution.”
Able to scan at up to 120 pages per minute [up to 50,000 page per day] and featuring a 500-sheet front loading feeder, the Kodak i4600 Scanner uses LED not Xenon fluorescent light to image capture meaning no warm up time and a massive reduction in power consumed. And power isn’t the only way costs are kept down – the price of consumables like separation and pick rollers are low which helps reduce the ongoing running costs.
In addition, the i4600 Scanner maintains full rated speeds even when scanning at 300 dpi for better OCR read rates, with valuable features like auto orientation, auto crop, and skew detection enabled.
Nigel Scanlan, PMI Health Group’s IT manager, says, “We process a large amount of documentation from a number of sources. The PSI:Capture and Kodak solution has enabled us to simplify our whole document scanning process significantly, automating what was previously a very labour intensive process.”
Neil Murphy, Kodak’s UK sales manager says, “The combination of OCR and high performance scanning offers organisations like PMI Health Group a fast and cost effective way of digitising important information without the manual overhead of re-keying in data. The return on investment is fast, with staff then able to focus on other far more productive activities.”