Case Study: Remote Storage Solution Ends Paper Document Woes

“When I first came to the University of Illinois, like any other big organization, they had mounds and mounds of paper,” said John Herndon, manager of IT, patient accounts. “In the patient accounts department, they process the hospital bills and claims ... It equates to literally reams of paper per month that they were saving, and [they] were running out of room.”

Medical and financial records need to be kept for seven and 10 years, respectively, so the problem would only get worse. University servers were tightly regulated, and Herndon had no way of knowing how much space he would need, so he turned to an outside solution provider to resolve his document storage problem. Herndon called in Datamation, Chicago, and Jim Collins.

Herndon&'s goal was to devise a simple system that would eliminate time wasted searching for documents. “The main criterion was accessibility for the staff,” he said. “As it used to be, the staff would put in a request if they needed information or a voucher, go down several floors, and find the actual piece of paper or find it on microfiche. It could take anywhere from three to five days before they got their request processed.”

Collins&' low-cost solution to the problem was a Web-based application for document imaging and document management called ImageSilo from Digitech Systems, Greenwood Village, Colo. Datamation is an ImageSilo reseller, leasing 5-Gbyte chunks of storage on Digitech&'s servers. End users then use a Web interface to manage their own documents even though they&'re stored remotely.

“They had all of the classic symptoms—space problems, misfilings,” Collins said. He had the university medical center give him some sample financial documents, and he put together a presentation.

The IT team at the medical center liked what they saw, so Herndon began by purchasing a Kodak 3500 scanner and Digitech&'s PaperFlow image capture software.

However, the department head put the project on a tight schedule, and Collins and the team only had two months to get thousands of documents scanned and uploaded to ImageSilo. “The biggest challenge was the time frame,” Collins said, “but we got the system in and deployed in under a week. ” Once the system was in place, the medical center could handle documents much more efficiently while saving money.

“Productivity has increased 100-fold. They&'re able to access the information [in] almost realtime,” Herndon said. “We&'ve managed to clear out tons of space, and [without] the cost of folders, boxes, rubber bands and storage space, we save money.”

Documents are now kept for 30 days, not seven years, and after being audited to ensure they have been correctly scanned and stored on ImageSilo, they are discarded. Herndon has 28 Gbytes of information already stored and can purchase more space as needed.

Herndon also likes ImageSilo&'s reporting features. “All kinds of things are available to me,” he said. “The reporting structure is excellent. I like the audit trail—especially in heath care—that&'s extremely important.”

Collins agrees that systems such as ImageSilo are especially useful in the health-care sector. ImageSilo tracks users and allows documents to be SSL encrypted, keeping sensitive patient information private.

“All of these places are very concerned about saving money and being able to do what HIPAA requires as far as privacy and the portability of these records. ImageSilo in itself doesn&'t make you HIPAA-compliant, but it helps you be HIPAA-compliant,” Collins said.