When imaging is put to use in government it benefits everyone. Here's how.
Imaging systems offer relief for government agents who work with huge amounts of important information. It enriches the public with better service and increased access to information. Here's how imaging makes government agencies work better.
Higher Productivity. With electronic indexes, workflow, on-line retrieval and effective storage, government departments can work smoothly. Searches are done quickly and office procedures are automated. No more filing paper.
Less Storage Space Consumed. Converting paper archives to microfilm or other media makes these sources more compact, saving money. It also makes them safe for long term storage.
Network-wide Access. One department can easily share files with another. They can work on the same documents simultaneously. This cuts down bureaucracy.
Processing Israel's Labor Party Primaries
March 25, 1996 -- the polls closed at midnight and within 10 hours Israel's Labor Party had their ballots calculated using forms processing technology from Top Image Systems (TiS) (Ramat Gan, Israel +972-3-752-5626). With just weeks before Israel's national elections, it was critical that the Labor Party obtain fast, accurate results in order to determine party structure and parliamentary nominees.
Super Image (Tel Aviv, Israel +972-3-624-0212), an automated forms processing service bureau, used a forms processing system developed by TiS. Super Image met the Labor Party's demands by quickly tallying more than 200,000 two-sided ballots while simultaneously identifying forgeries.
By employing Super Image at a cost of only $200,000, Labor saved time and money. They focused their energies on the upcoming national elections. The chief contender, the Lecot, had problems. They waited days for their results. They used a $2.5 million touch-pad system.
Labor had to process more than 200,000 ballots (over 400,000 single-sided forms), with peak hourly volume in excess of 70,000 forms. Super Image used two Novell servers, two indexing stations, three Kodak double-sided scanners (two 900 series and one 500 series), five processing stations, 25 completion stations, one controller station, two download stations (one optical disc and one magnetic media) and one retrieval station.
The AFPS Pro forms processing application automatically reads and processes the information contained in forms, incorporating OCR/ICR/OMR engines. Features include voting algorithms for weighting recognition engine results, image enhancement, automatic virtual fielding and proprietary form recognition, removal and reconstruction.
"This was the first time a solution like this was used," says Ido Schechter THD, VP of TiS. "It was a huge success. The polls closed at midnight. We started getting the envelopes at 1am. The results were done at 7am."
Better Access to Medical Research
The National Institute of Health (NIH) is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. It is the premier biomedical research organization in the world. The bulk of what they do is fund biomedical research at universities. Part of their research is finding cures for diseases like cancer and AIDS.
NIH is comprised of 24 separate Institutes, Centers and Divisions. The office of the Executive Secretariat receives and routes all correspondence to the appropriate Institutes. The documents are photocopied and a hard copy is sent to the appropriate Institute. They chose Optika's (Colorado Springs, CO 719-548-9800) document management system to help route office documents.
After documents are imaged, they are stored in an optical jukebox. Later, if someone needs to investigate the correspondence on a specific topic such as breast cancer, the information may be on screen in a matter of minutes. The user can also see how many letters are coming in on the topic of breast cancer.
"We decided to do the project to get better control of all the documents that go to the Director of NIH," says Beverly Breitman, assistant to the director. These are letters, personnel notices, Federal Register notices, congressional documents, requests from academia and medical patients of the Executive Secretariat.
The documents often need to be handled by one or more Institutes. "We also have to make sure the response fits all the parties involved. If a teenage girl has a question about breast cancer, the response would be coordinated through the Cancer Institute, The National Institute of Child Health and Women's Health," says Breitman.
"We have a computerized tracking system," she says. "We assign each document a number. The images of the documents themselves appear on workstations. We no longer need to look for the original. We scan once it's reviewed for indexing. The indexing is done using a subject keyword list and all relevant data like date and sender are entered into the system.
"We store documents quickly and accurately. That's where imaging has saved us a great deal of time. We are also connecting to other offices of the NIH for better access."
In their office they have 18 users with 10 users outside. There is the capacity to go to 25 more users. "We will eventually expand to 50 users connected directly to our system," says Karen O'Steen, Director of the Executive Secretariat.
They hope to have a pilot up and running by the end of this year to use Optika's FilePower Suite for imaging and workflow. "This will really speed up our response time," says O'Steen. "It saves a lot of people a lot of time," says Breitman. "Time to locate a document has been cut to a tenth of what it used to be. We are also imaging historical files back to the 1940s and storing those on optical discs.
"They are kept on-site for requests. We are very pleased with it and eagerly anticipating the workflow capability."
National Micrographics (Washington, DC 301-622-4300) was the integrator for NIH.
Imaging Wins Legal Battle
The Civil Division of the US Attorney's office handles defense contractor fraud cases and healthcare fraud cases. The most common examples are companies that overcharge the government for missiles and tanks or provide products with defective parts and healthcare organizations that overcharge (e.g. Medicare fraud cases). The USAOCD sees cases when a party defrauds the government of $250,000 or more. A majority of these cases have stakes well into the millions.
Currently under wrap is a case involving a defense contractor that manufactures computers. The contractor, whose identity is under seal, sold new computers that were built with used components at an estimated government loss of several million dollars.
This case involved documents scattered among 16,000 boxes. They were somewhat organized by contractor and witness. One contract could have 2,000 pages in different boxes because they were worked on by different people. The USAOCD accumulated two million pages and scanned a selected 500,000 of those. LaserFiche's (Torrance, CA 310-793-1888) NetWare running on three Micron Pentium PC workstations with 21" Hitachi monitors, a high-speed Fujitsu 3097 scanner and a mega 150 CD tower.
"LaserFiche was up and running in half a day," says attorney Howard Daniels. "I feel we've been given the capacity to slug it out toe to toe against the large companies. Our competition consists mainly of large, private firms and many contract with a vendor to put their case records in a database.
"We've tried other search engines but LaserFiche seems to work the best," says Daniels. "With this case, most of the records were memos and correspondence. The papers varied in age and quality. The images of handwritten notes were easy to read and indexed by template fields."
These were records of various types of document evidence. They came from the offices of both parties involved. They held price estimates, meeting notes, actual contracts and any general correspondence. "After the agency seized the boxes we had to do the rest," says Daniels.
"The documents that scanned and OCR'd well did not have to be indexed. The others were indexed with customized fields from LaserFiche. When we did a search it would go through all the index fields and the OCR'd data. "We first sent the scanning out to a local service bureau. They were too slow and wanted to send the job offshore. This was not an option. We were dealing with classified government documents. Things were a little slow inhouse because we didn't have enough scanners.
"It is a bonus to be able to search records by text-search and index fields. It was just about impossible to manually go through all those boxes. The case involved a lot of different contracts that the government had with the defense contractor.
"Important documents were scattered among several different places. In the past, we had to manually search for these. We made several copies for the appropriate attorneys and to their paralegal assistants."
The USAOCD has immediate plans to add a LaserFiche Snapshot utility. Snapshot will enable users to import Windows files, including WordPerfect, Access and Excel pages into LaserFiche.
The case settled out of court. The system cost $55,000. "We could not have handled this case without the system," says Daniels. "It paid for itself. We're now using it for other cases.
"We're extremely satisfied with LaserFiche," Daniels says. "It has the best indexing capability, it is intuitive for quick use and it came out with the highest accuracy rate in testing. We like the screen setup with file folders for drag and drop moving of files. We also like being able to mark highlights on the key portions of the large amounts of OCR'd data."
