How can healthcare benefit from OCR?
Can you benefit from OCR?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is powerful software that transforms images such as faxes and scanned documents into human readable text. Access to this text is very powerful and can be used for many purposes. The questions below will help you determine whether or not you could benefit from an OCR solution.
Does your business receive faxes?
Yes, yes, yes. If you are receiving faxes on a daily basis, someone has to do something with them. It could be data entry, it could be sorting and scanning, or it could be sorting and (gasp!) filing. In any of those scenarios leveraging the text on those images will be valuable to your business in some way.
Do you have multi-page images that contain unsearchable text?
Again; yes, yes, yes. The simplest and most obvious benefit of OCR is being able to convert large images into readable text that can easily be searched for important information. Imagine being able to hone in on a specific block of text in a 50 page document without having to hunt for it.
Do you have a need to pull info from your scans & faxes?
As noted above, documents that have been through OCR are searchable. The benefits don’t end there though. Copy + Paste tools are also available, making manipulation of the data your searching for that much easier.
In addition to the above basic functions, OCR output can be leveraged to great effect. The below questions will help demonstrate how powerful OCR can be.
Do you have a need to redact sensitive information?
You’ll no longer need to scour documents for where the sensitive information is located. In addition to simple OCR tools, some solutions also offer the ability to find and securely redact sensitive information. All with very little human interaction required.
Are your team members spending time on data entry?
Some OCR solutions offer ways to leverage the data captured from scanned documents and faxed images. Using rules based on your business needs these offerings can automatically seek out and populate fields you want in a database or downstream system.
Do you need to classify or sort documents as you receive them?
OCR can be used with machine learning and other business rules to automatically classify and sort documents. This can be used to automatically route documents to the correct department in your organization.
