There’s a running joke in the world of records and information management: if you want to make something disappear, digitize it. Once it’s in bits and bytes, it’s as good as gone!

We all know that’s partly true. If not indexed or managed well, any type of file – physical or digital – can go missing. One thing is for sure, though – the switch to digitizing documents and digital-first approaches is not easy. In fact, records and information management have created a challenging transition for many organizations.

For starters, digitizing documents (a.k.a. a traditional scanning project) can be disruptive to an organization. Since the most expensive thing you can do with a box of paper is scan it, a large scanning project often gets relegated to the back of the priorities list. However, at the end of the day, digitizing documents is here to stay. The trick is finding ways to get the job done efficiently with limited resources and within a set budget.

Records and Information Management: Digitization Use Cases

After conducting hundreds of interviews with a variety of our clients, the Access team quickly realized there was a salient need for an efficient digitization solution. Clients were really struggling to solve their records and information management project challenges. During one interview with a Director of Information Management at a large international healthcare organization, we learned their key challenge was meeting the needs of their providers in a timely manner. For example, many new patients were coming from recently acquired private practices outside of the healthcare organization’s network. This meant the patient records were not easily accessible and needed to be digitized. Scanning the entirety of these patients’ historical records would take too long and cost far too much money. For instances like this, the organization wanted to be able to scan only what they needed, right when they needed it. They also wanted to eliminate physical file rooms to free up valuable campus space.

Another interview was with an Executive Vice President of Field Operations at a Fortune 100 energy company in the oil and gas sector. They generate a significant number of paper records like land files and well logs. Typically, these documents are created in disparate geographies and then shipped to several storage locations around the country. Unfortunately, the quality and consistency of their chain of custody, audit trails, and transit times vary widely. They wanted to ensure more consistency and more control over the records and information management process. Additionally, as their backlog of paper records continued to grow with each new site, they recognized they needed a better way to manage them. This would enable them to ensure compliance with regulations regarding privacy, retention, and information governance.

Digitizing Documents: The Takeaways

We took a closer look at all the use cases we were documenting and applied some deeper analysis. While investigating our historical operations and projects, we discovered that up to 80% of the images we digitize for clients are never actually retrieved after they’ve been scanned. We also learned the remaining 20% is often mission-critical to the organization and retrieved frequently. Whether it’s a medical record, a loan origination package, land and well files, or countless other types of records, they are the documents needed most often and quickly.

We asked our clients,

“Do you need to scan all your records or can you take a phased approach with specific files? What if there were a solution to digitize only the records you need, when you need them within a very quick turnaround?”

They wholeheartedly agreed this would truly be the ideal scenario.

The Inspiration

Those conversations are what inspired the launch of Access Unify. Our award-winning Access Unify | Active File Service is a technology-powered document digitization service delivered by our experienced staff across North America. Our domain expertise in digitization, transportation, security, compliance, and cloud computing allows us to guarantee a four-hour-or-less turnaround time for digitizing documents (an industry-first), while still offering our best-in-class document digitization service at a flat monthly fee. Files are scanned, OCR’d, and electronically delivered via the Access Unify platform or directly to your line-of-business system.

Our ability to offer a document scanning service level agreement (SLA) of four hours or less proved invaluable to clients as these digitizing services clearly defined a process around digitizing documents that are mission-critical to clients’ ongoing success.

So if you’re one of the companies trying to scan everything, you should know that there’s a better, more practical, and cost-efficient way. Access Unify digitizing services often save clients north of 30%. Join the thousands of organizations around the world that trust Access with their most important information. Save time and money by working smarter with our digitizing services. In the meantime, click here to learn more about Access Unify | Active File Service.

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