October, 1996
SCORE DRUGS FASTER WITH IMAGING
All drug companies want to get their products approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) as quickly as possible. But they face a bureaucratic quandary - every approval requires a ton of paperwork. A departmental document imaging system can speed up the process.
Eli Lilly (Indianapolis, IN 317-276-2000) is no different from any other pharmaceutical company in at least one respect. They've got a lot of potentially life-saving drugs that people can't buy until the government gives the green light. If you need the medication, the wait can seem interminable.
When Eli Lilly wants to introduce a new drug to the US, they give the FDA information on a large number of human studies. (In the case of Prozac, one of Eli Lilly's more famous and popular medications, the studies involved 250,000 subjects!)
Each subject has an individual case report showing their reactions to the drug. The FDA keeps one-page summaries of each case and groups them in large binders. That's the bottleneck.
Sometimes an FDA agent wants to see a particular person's file. In some instances, they want to look at every patient's file. When this happens, the drug company has to locate each requested file and send three copies to the FDA. This drags out the review process and slows the release of new drugs.
Eli Lilly realized that this inefficiency was costing them dearly. They wanted to streamline the process. They looked at various manual and electronic systems and decided to go with imaging.
"Imaging was a new concept to us in 1995," says Eric Stauffer, Eli Lilly's systems analyst. "I felt it would reduce the time needed for drug approval. I wanted an imaging system that made the process more efficient. One way to do this was to install a system that let the FDA call up patient reports on their computers."
After lots of searching, he chose Imagination Software's (Silver Spring, MD 301-588-8411) IMAGinE toolkit, a Visual Basic custom control or VBX. This let Eli Lilly incorporate the imaging features that they needed into their existing database. The programming took Stauffer about 40 hours -- the system was up and running in a few days.
Eli Lilly has been using the system for about 18 months. In that time, they made two drug submissions to the FDA. An imaging app written with IMAGinE scans paper reports and indexes them into the central database. IMAGinE's barcode recognition feature lets them barcode their pages with index information. This creates search points within the studies.
"Anyone looking for a particular study or report can find it with the click of a mouse while sitting at a desk," says Stauffer. "No one has to look for a needle in a haystack in storage rooms full of thousands of documents. When it comes to getting a drug on the market, we no longer have to photocopy sets of binders full of paper studies for the FDA. We now send them all the information on CDs.
"It takes us about 15 minutes to train FDA agents on our system," says Stauffer. "They can do everything they used to do on paper with the system. The big advantage is that they do most of it instantly. Imagination was the only company who did exactly what we wanted. The system is cost-effective and easy to use."
Vegas Builders
Bet on Imaging
Del Webb (Las Vegas, NV 702-256-5523) builds Sun Belt homes for older folks. They're the second largest builder of retirement communities in Las Vegas. Their connection to Nevada goes back to 1946, when they were the general contractor on the Flamingo Hotel and Casino built by the infamous Bugsy Siegel.
With a history like that, Del Webb knows a sure bet when they see one. That's why they bet on imaging. They're using PaperClip's (Hackensack, NJ 201-487-3503) SQL-based imaging, workflow and storage management software to solve their previous paper overload.
The construction company stored their enormous number of documents in two locations. Active documents (between three and five years old) stayed in the office, while older documents migrated to an off-site warehouse.
But this paper-based hierarchical storage management proved costly and inconvenient. The two sites were constantly faxing documents back and forth or sending them by messenger.
Del Webb created a task force to tackle the paper tiger. They decided that imaging was the best way to gain control of their documents. After looking at several systems, they decided to go with PaperClip for several reasons. The software let Del Webb:
Share their documents between departments and locations spanning across three buildings. Process accounting paperwork for distant communities. Follow a well-defined growth path.Offer operators an easy-to-use interface. Many of the users had only limited computer skills. This system was largely intuitive -- users could work out most of it themselves. Tie imaging with their other applications. Their first community went online in October 1995. A second followed soon after. Now, six departments use the system -- accounting, sales contracts, customer service, legal, human resources and executive. Some departments share files. Others keep their documents under lock and key.
"PaperClip provides security by creating electronic file cabinets," says financial analyst Janis Grossman, a member of the Del Webb task force. "They can be open, giving access to everyone, or closed. Closed files require passwords and offer limited access. Several levels of security provide tight access to confidential documents."
Del Webb uses PaperClip Workflow 4.0 for manual workflow support, electronic signatures and history tracking. Users create document routes with a drag-and-drop interface, without programming.
The system runs on a Novell network. Images reside on a Pinnacle Micro (Irvine, CA 714-789-3000) 40-gig jukebox managed by PaperClip NOSS (Network Optical Storage System). Batch scanners from Bell & Howell (Chicago, IL 708-675-7600) and personal scanners from Fujitsu (San Jose, CA 408-432-6333) capture their images.
Del Webb spent about $200,000 to get the two communities online with hardware and software. The ROI was estimated at a year. "Our savings have come from the reduction of storage space, copy paper cost and increased productivity," says Grossman. "We no longer spend half an hour looking for a file. We save even more money because we don't have to call customers back with answers to their questions. It's all done instantly.
"We overlooked the scanning process and didn't take into account how this job was going to be handled. We gave it to the accounting people because they're the department of record. Their employees are responsible for scanning and indexing."
Del Webb says the installation was relatively painless. "The staunchest opponents are now the system's biggest advocates," says Grossman. "In fact, the former opponents now train new users. They trained more than 100 in less than three weeks.
"Everyone loves the system because it makes their job easier. One of the reasons is that all the employees were involved in its implementation. We spent quite a lot of time with each employee to make sure they were comfortable with it."
Samson Builds on Imaging
Samson Management (Rego Park, NY 718-830-0131) is using imaging to build and manage their real estate holdings more efficiently. The company has been constructing apartment buildings, shopping centers and private homes for more than 30 years.
Samson was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on paper-based files. Last year, they started looking at ways to improve the manual system, which was expensive to maintain and hard to manage.
They began by identifying their three primary file systems -- accounts payable, lease files and general building information. These totaled more than 1.5 million pages of paper. That's a lotta paper.
Their biggest costs were paper filing and folder maintenance. They spent an inordinate amount of time copying sections of files, retrieving them and distributing them to staff members. They needed a lot of space to store these paper files -- and the rent wasn't cheap.
They also wasted time waiting for files, restoring lost or misplaced files, searching for misfiled or checked out files and tracking paper through the obscure paths of the company.
They looked at a variety of systems but couldn't find what they really needed at a price they wanted to pay. Samson needed an imaging system that provided departmental access to documents and was easy to use, with a clearly defined growth path. They also wanted to be able to expand the system enterprise-wide later.
So they decided to make instead of buy. Samson spent six months putting together their own comprehensive suite of applications that
image-enable their management information system. It's been up and running for a year, with about 50 concurrent users.
The program lets staff exchange, process and share scanned images, faxes and folders across the enterprise with a departmental structure and safeguards. Users don't have to wrestle with complex search engines. Inquiry functions are in the software. All they do is click a button.
"We've reduced storage space. Files aren't getting lost. Instead, they're backed up on the system," says Edgar Caparas, Samson Management's MIS director. "Retrieval time has been cut significantly. Files rarely take more than a few seconds to access. Our customer service is sharper."
The company's total investment in imaging was about $150,000. "We expect the system to fully pay for itself within about two years," says Caparas.
After the project was completed, they formed a company called Samson
InfoTech (Rego Park, NY 718-830-0131) to develop and market the product. The product's name? They use the term "ImageTerm."
Along with their own home-grown ImageTerm software, Samson's imaging system consists of one high-speed scanner from Bell & Howell (Chicago, IL 708-675-7600), two mid-volume and two low-volume scanners from Fujitsu (San Jose, CA 408-432-6333). A 30-gig optical jukebox from Hewlett-Packard (Greeley, CO 800-826-4111) stores the images. Even the most proficient do-it-yourselfers need some help from the pros sometimes.
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