Magazine Article | January 1, 1998

OCR & Forms Processing Help Anesthesiologist Process 40,000 Files

For many of Dade Behring's customers, next-day delivery is not good enough. The $1.3 billion laboratory instrument manufacturer often has to ensure same-day delivery. Integrating technologies with its new SAP system helps Dade Behring deliver the goods on time.

Business Solutions, January 1998
Written by: Nancy Senger
The 40 physician practices of the Associated Anesthesiologists of Peoria, IL's process over 40,000 patient examination forms ever year. "Manually processing and filing these paper forms was a nightmare," says Brent Teubel, administrator for the Associated Anesthesiologists of Peoria, IL.

Technologies Combined In Solution
The paperwork problem was solved by Focus 2000, Inc. (Indianapolis, IN). Focus 2000 is a software developer that integrated forms recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) technology into a document imaging system, named EZFiler. EZFiler eliminated the time spent indexing documents for follow-on retrieval. Focus 2000 selected Ligature's Visual Basic OCR Engine to perform the character recognition function because of the recognition performance and ease of integration.

Another feature of the OCR engine was its ability to "read as you read," which means that if the image has various fonts and points, the recognized text will likewise retain those characteristics. Focus 2000 evaluated the Ligature engine's recognition capabilities against other engines.

Forms Recognition Part Of System
Kofax Image Controls was selected to provide the scanning and forms recognition capabilities of the system. Recognition results are dramatically impacted by the quality of the image being interpreted. In addition to supporting an array of scanners, Kofax incorporates the capability of forms recognition. So, when a form has been recognized the image can be enhanced based on unique characteristics of that form.

EZFiler was designed to run in a client/server environment on either Novell or NT networks. The forms recognition and OCR functions are typically performed on an image server or a desktop workstation. Windows 95 and Windows 3.11 desktop workstations are supported with OS/2 under construction.

Associated Anesthesiologists of Peoria, IL was one of the first installed customers of EZFiler's. "With EZFiler, we can essentially scan the documents and forget about them until the documents are needed," says Teubel. "EZFiler is intuitive and user friendly, so our employees been learned the system in a short period of time."