Welcome to the second edition of our new e-newsletter. We hope you found the last one interesting and informative. Congratulations to Linda who works in Hudsonville! She was the winner of our trivia contest in the previous edition. She won $20 in area Chamber Certificates. The question, again, was how long will archival film last? The answer was 500 years and it was found on a table we used to compare scanning to microfilm. We will have a trivia contest in this edition, and the answer will be found somewhere in this newsletter, and some additional quick readings. Submit your response via the link below to enter your name to win valuable prizes. We welcome your feedback on our new e-newsletter. Good reading!

 

Included In this Issue:

 

 

Trivia Contest

 

What's a Huffy?

The answer can be found somewhere in this issue.  To be included in this drawing click here to send your answer.

 

Mortgage Company Dumps Files

 

According to a report by Dawn Jones posted on March 19, 2008, on the website of WJRT, a Southeast Michigan ABC-affiliate, the personal information of hundreds of local residents, including Social Security numbers and financial records, was exposed to the public thanks to a local realty mortgage company who placed them in an open dumpster.

 

Authorities across the country are struggling to contain similar problems caused by the downturn in the mortgage business and the resulting widespread failure of mortgage companies.

-From June 2008 NAID News

 

 

 

According to World Privacy Forum (WPF) Executive Director Pam Dixon, medical identity theft is becoming big business. Anecdotal evidence indicates it is increasing. The WPF estimated in 2006 that between 250,000 and 500,000 people were victims of medical identity theft.

What is it? Medical identity theft occurs when a person's medical information is used to conduct fake billing, purchase prescription medications, or even obtain medical treatment. Its cost to medical care is increasing as more bogus billings take place.

 

"It's a very profitable crime," Dixon says, adding that thefts happen most often in large institutions or at clinics.

 

Protect your health information by making sure all papers obtained during medical treatment are accounted for and properly destroyed. Keep track of insurance cards and report lost or stolen ones promptly. Also, warn your employees of the dangers. With the continuing rise in health care costs, guarding medical information just makes sense. 

Telecommuting Revisited

In the last issue we informed you of some of the potential dangers of allowing people to work from home. There is one tip we forgot to mention if you are considering employing this practice. Make sure your employees return all paper to the office for proper disposal. That includes sticky notes and scratch paper. Encourage employees to be cautious with company documents and reports. Develop policies to ensure they are followed. 

Often, a way offices attempt to save is by reusing the back sides of papers that have previously been through the copier. While this sounds good in theory, reusing the back sides can lead to printer and copier jams and accompanying downtime and repair costs. Always consider the long term impact of your "green" decisions.

 

 

 

Document scanning and accompanying document management software can be an effective way to reduce paper in the office and reduce the costs of long term storage. Often when companies are considering a document management system, organizations that sell systems and hardware use lots of terms you may be unfamiliar with. Barb Coppock, CDIA+, Lakeshore Document Services imaging manager sheds some light on these items. Two key terms are defined below, and we explain why knowing them is important.
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. The scanned images are processed within the document management software with an "OCR engine." This "engine" examines the image and creates text from what it "sees," so the information is easily extracted by search software. These searches can either be accomplished by searching the entire page, or by searching a particular section of the page commonly known as zonal OCR. OCR is used to find key information in one or more documents in a matter of seconds. An image that has been through the OCR process will be larger in size and take up more space on the server. The accuracy rate of an OCR'd document is determined, in part, by the software and hardware used to create it. A good OCR percentage of accuracy is 95-99% PER CHARACTER. This means that out of every 100 characters, or letters, 1-5 will be wrong. Obstacles to producing the best accuracy include shaded backgrounds, light print, punctuation, or underlining of words and numbers. Also, OCR does not work on handwritten documents. OCR is often used with a primary search index to ensure that electronic documents can be found when needed.

Another term used is DPI, which stands for dots per inch. It is a way to measure scanning resolution. As a rule of thumb, 200-240 dpi is used for standard business documents, 300 dpi is for grey scale or OCR processing, and 400 dpi or greater is for photos. What needs to to be taken into consideration is that as the dpi increases, so does the quality and the file size. Larger file sizes with higher dpi slow the scanning process and have a greater impact on your network. The cost of storage also grows with increased resolution because the file sizes are larger. Some software and image types can be compressed to reduce file sizes to a reasonable size for your organization.

It is important to know the industry terms and how they may affect your decision making as you prepare to go "paperless." Want help wading through the jargon and how it can impact your decisions? Give Barb a call at our office.

 

 

"Only a mediocre person is always at his best."

-- W. Somerset Maugham