Americans spend $477 billion a year more on healthcare than other advanced countries. Medicalbillingandcoding.org has a great two part series of infographics (part one and two) that look at some of the truly absurd reasons your stitches cost $1,500.

Part one looks at where all the money goes. The first place to look is at our “routine” visits, which, when they’re compared to other wealthy nations, are much more expensive in the US:

• Need a checkup? It’ll cost you $59, double the cost in Canada, France and the Netherlands.
• Hospital visit? Plan to spend $3,181 – more than triple what you’d spend in France.
• Having a baby? Set aside $7,473, or more than twice what you’d pay in Germany.

And not only do we spend more than other countries – the US ranked last in overall quality of healthcare among surveyed nations. Part two delves into some of the myths and realities of why US healthcare is so expensive. Guess what? It’s not because we like to drink (hooray!), because we’re old, because we’re fat, or because we like to sue our doctors. The real reasons?

• Providers charge more because they can.
• Doctors earn around 5x more than the average patient (most other countries average around 3x more).
• Outpatient spending – which leads to huge profit margins for hospitals – totals 41% of healthcare costs.

But the most important?

That’s right. One of the real reasons healthcare is so expensive is because we’re spending $500 per person on administrative overhead. You know what’s coming next, right? Of course Laserfiche has “an app for that”! Our customers have found some pretty creative ways to reduce their administrative overhead with Laserfiche:

• Pre Billing Consultants, a third-party medical billing company in NJ, has used Laserfiche to automate billing workflow, so a process that used to take three employees a full day now takes one person 15 minutes. (Even better – they’ve redeployed 60% of their FTE’s required to produce a claim to more productive work.)
• Capital Care Medical Group, a physician-owned medical practice, reduced the processing time for invoices 80% by using Laserfiche to create a shared service AP center for their 27 medical offices across upstate NY.
• Iredell Memorial Hospital recovered $40,000 per month in ER revenue loss by eliminating lost and misplaced records.

Check out our new Website to learn how Laserfiche helps medical groups, hospitals and medical billing departments and companies reduce overhead expenses. Or check out our credentialing demo for a real-life example!

There are three core missions of any county government: law enforcement, land management and care of the poor.  All three of these are important,  but for Bremer County, IA, land management had become a challenge all its own.

Even after  implementing a software system to deal with land management records, the county continued to face huge challenges.  Among these were low user adoption rate, high software maintenance costs, and the inability to meet stringent formatting for submission of digital records to the state.

That’s when the county switched to a truly agile ECM system that helped them overcome those challenges. Here’s how:

1. A New System for Less Than an Upgrade. “We were looking at a substantial enough reinvestment to retain our current system that it made sense to start looking at other solutions.”

2. Deployment to Six Departments in Two Months. “Quick Fields automated all our scanning processes in all our departments.”

3. Six Months of Scanning in Less Than a Week. “It would have taken staff over a month and a half to scan in all those documents using our old system. Instead, using Quick Fields, we were able to get those documents scanned in less than a week.”

4. Integration Saves $2,500 in Fines. “We’re no longer charged $2,500 in fines for not providing the digital documents to the state that was such a problem with our old system.”

5. Adding the Sheriff’s Office and More. “The remaining three departments that don’t use Laserfiche are seeing how much the other departments love its ease of use and speed, so they’re starting to ask how they can use it too.”

Read Bremer County’s Story.

A few weeks ago, Alan Weintraub and Stephen Powers of Forrester released a new report, “Plan Your ECM Strategy for Business, Persuasive, Transactional and Foundational Needs” (discussed in a great CMSWire article here). Weintraub and Powers note that while enterprises have traditionally taken a product-specific approach to ECM strategies, today that’s not enough. Weintraub and Powers recommend changing the way the enterprise views content, looking at the four categories of business, persuasive, foundational and transactional content, as well as associated technologies. They suggest that the “ECM” approach may not always be the answer.

Weintraub and Power are right – a lot of the time, not every vendor has every product that meets every single need. (That’s where a program like the Laserfiche PDP program comes in handy, so customers can easily extend an ECM system with pre-built, pre-configured integrations that fill white space.) But when it comes to an ECM deployment, we’ve seen how moving from a transactional to a foundational approach multiplies the benefits – and the ROI.

Our customers have traditionally deployed ECM in a transactional capacity where they’ve been able to get a “quick hit” of ROI that they can tie to the bottom line. (For example, RMS, a medical device manufacturer, cut order processing from 10 weeks to 72 hours.) Once they have that, it’s easy to take advantage of the ROI justification to roll ECM out foundationally and engage what we call the “ROI Multiplier” effect. RMS moved on from using ECM for transactional order processing to using it as a foundational technology in their two plants in Minnesota and Tennessee that automatically generates device history records, automates accounts payable, simplifies auditing and creates a company intranet.

The “ROI Multiplier” is more than a math problem and it does more than simple arithmetic; it exponentially extends the cost savings of ECM once it’s deployed as a foundational technology. Take Ramsey County, MN. Counties have three core missions – law enforcement, land management, and care of the poor – so when Ramsey County started their ECM deployment, they chose a revenue-protecting process to automate: case management. Why?

• It was tied into the county’s core mission.
• It was a complex, paper- and resource-intensive process that touched many departments.
• It was a foundational process that protected funding from state and federal agencies.
• It was a repeatable process that, once completed, could be easily reused (with minor configuration changes) in many different departments.

Once Ramsey County finished case management and had the ROI justification, they moved onto more processes and a complete foundational ECM deployment – all thanks to the ROI multiplier effect.

Want to learn more? Check out a demo of the same case management process Ramsey County used!

Q: A client would like to use Quick Fields to blank out bank account details on the documents they process.  In some documents, the sensitive information falls in a standardized location, whereas in other documents, the bank account numbers are sprinkled throughout.  What Quick Fields processes do I need to configure to achieve automatic redaction of bank account numbers on both kinds of documents?

A: In order to handle both types of documents, you will want to configure the “Fixed Annotation” and “Auto Annotation” processes.  For the more standardized documents, the Fixed Annotation process will place a redaction on a specified location within the document.  When the location of the sensitive information is more varied, “Auto Annotation” will seek out text that matches a specific pattern (like a bank account number), and automatically place a redaction over it.

Of course, whether you’re using Fixed or Auto Annotation, the redaction will apply to the document image as well as the document’s text stream.   This means you can rest easy that users without rights to see through redactions will never have access to the redacted information via the document itself, or via search results.

This week, we unveiled our new corporate website.   Sparked by the desire to have a more dynamic website and a need to edit the site in a more agile fashion, multiple teams put their heads together and embarked on a re-design project.   We took the chance to re-design the site visually, but aside from those visual enhancements,  we made two pretty cool changes with regard to how we leverage our own product within the site.  You’ll see these changes if you use the search bar, or download additional resources from one of our industry solutions pages.

First up: search powered by the Laserfiche search engine.  Our site developers leveraged the same search engine you’ll find in the Laserfiche product for our new site search functionality.  When you enter a search term, the engine performs a federated search of three separate websites–the corporate site, the news portal, and the support site– making it a powerful way to find the content you want, fast.  I once heard a Laserfiche Presales Engineer tell a prospect, “At Laserfiche, we want you to be able to find a document based on anything you know about it.”  Now the same thing is true for our website. So go ahead, enter a search term and see what you find; we think you’ll be impressed.

Second: additional resources served up by the Laserfiche server.  Gone are the days when the Manager of Marketing Communications had to upload a whitepaper in four different spots to make it appear on four different pages on the site.  Thanks to our handy site development team, our new site has a powerful new back-end incorporating functionality of the Laserfiche product.  This means that whenever you download  “Additional Resources” from a page on the site, you are being served a PDF from our own, corporate repository.  By manipulating the metadata associated with the document in Laserfiche, anyone with proper rights can push a document live to one or many pages on the website.  I’m not sure how much more simple and elegant we could get.  And if you’re interested in building in something similar for a customer, you will soon be able to read about it on the Solution Exchange.