The Imaging Department at Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators in Salt Lake City has been scanning incoming mail for over decade.  IPMA interviewed Mike O'Hara, Deseret's Central Mail & Imaging Coordinator, on the process, benefits and what other in-plants should know when considering scanning mail.

When Did You Begin Scanning Mail?

Deseret has been scanning mail for over 14 years, but not always on front end. Up until 7-8 years ago they routed all the mail to the departments directly and we would get it on the backend after the processing was done.  But for the last 6-7 years we have been migrating almost everything we do into a front end process where we are scanning the mail right out of the envelope.

Back row l to r: Colton Smith, Kim Workman, Bob Monthey, Janet Andersen, Brent Piep, Gary VanDolzer. Front row l to r: Kate Wolsey, Eileen Adams, Natrone Sears, Shelly Wunderly

Do You Scan All Mail?

Yes, about 95% or more is scanned and indexed into an imaging system and delivered to departments electronically. The only exception is personal mail or something addressed to an executive.

What Equipment and Software Do You Use?

We have a program called Data Cap which is used primarily for doing optical character recognition (OCR) for our medical claims. Our programmers have written some homegrown programs in-house for simple indexing. The scanning machines are from Bell & Howell, the software from Kofax that exports images from scanning to the imaging system and the imaging system itself is called Web Extender. These programs tie into our company's operating system, AMISYS which processes all of the claims. Our IT people have really had to put a lot of time and effort into making sure those programs work together.

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Scanning approximately 10,000 pages daily

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How Many Pages Do You Scan Daily?

We scan and make an image of approximately 10,000 pages each day which translates into 2.5 - 3.5 pages per document.

What Is Your Turnaround Time?

For several years we had a 5-day turnaround window from the time our mailroom received the document, batched, scanned, OCR'd and routed it to wherever it needed to go. Six months ago our company changed to a new operating system with greater efficiencies and so did our turnaround expectations. Our requirement for most imaging is a 3-day turnaround. Some of the smaller groups have a same-day turnaround. We were actually able to shorten our turnaround without increasing staffing.

Briefly Describe the Process

We open every single mail piece and basically screen it and determine if it should go into the imaging system. We have a staff of 3 in our mailroom that is trained as to what should be imaged. Once the scanning decision is made, the piece goes to one of our 2 full-time scanning operators. We have 2 high-volume scanning machines and a third back-up machine that we use if it's an usually high mail day.

If the materials are read using OCR, there is an electronic verification process. OCR tells us that it read the document with high confidence, low confidence or no confidence.  If it has been read with high confidence, there's not a lot of human intervention. It goes on to a report and from that point the processor takes care of whatever transaction is required and it is received electronically by the recipient in one day.  If it's read with low confidence, then one of our 6 data verifiers goes through it and the system will stop on each part of that document that it read with low confidence and that person will basically verify it, for example to determine if it shows a zero rather than an O. (Handwritten documents are scanned and do go through the OCR process, but all of the text has to be verified because the technology we have will not read a handwritten document.)

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Scanning cut turnaround time 65%

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How Much Time Has Scanning Saved the Company?

During the past 6 months, we have been able to trim our turnaround time by 65%. Plus, we have also significantly reduced our company's incoming customer service phone calls. Because a lot of the calls we receive are from a physician's office or hospital calling to inquire about where a claim is in the process.  Because of what we have been able to save in the turnaround time, we have reduced the time it takes for checks to go out to participants, physicians and hospitals.

How Many Employees Work in the Imaging Department?

Basically our staff consists of 15 people.

Advice for In-Plants Considering Scanning Mail?

You have to have a good IT dept. because it takes a lot of programming resources.  Plus we have a lot of different vendors involved so having good IT support is very important.

Another issue - we serve a lot of different departments such as medical, dental, as well as administering a pension plan, 401K, life insurance, etc. We have to make sure we house each department's documents in a way that will be easily searchable for them when they receive a call from a customer. Make sure you have an open line of communication with each department and their specific needs. If you are fortunate enough to be setting up an imaging system from the beginning, try and be as consistent as possible doing imaging from one department to another.  For example, if you are looking for a date, make sure the date and other information is always formatted the same among departments.