THE NEWSLETTER OF IMAGE PROCESSING SYSTEMS - ISSUE 3 MARCH 1, 2005
IPS Supports Wrap-up of 9-11 Recovery Program for the American Red Cross
When disaster struck New York City on September 11, 2001, the American Red Cross was right on the front lines. The organization set up field offices in lower Manhattan to help deal immediately with the injured, the homeless and distressed, and then to help New Yorkers with the longer-term job of putting their lives back together. And like every other medical or social service operation, this one generated paperwork - over one million pages of medical records, death certificates, records on affected family members, mental health information, employment data and housing records. Today, the 9-11 Recovery Program is in its final stages and IPS has completed work o nsite in lower Manhattan to scan the case files and index them to the key identifiers for each case. The resulting digital files are archived on CD and delivered for both search-and-retrieval on a new Document Management System and permanent storage at Red Cross headquarters in Washington DC.
At IPS, Security Starts with ImageTrack SM
The American Red Cross story demonstrates an important fact. Documents that IPS handles for its clients have high value and require absolute confidentiality. For this reason, IPS provides its clients with solutions to their three major security concerns:
- The physical security of documents from the time they are picked up for conversion to the time they are returned
- Access security applied to the document images once they are in electronic form
- Storage security in the event of a disaster or disruption to your business
The physical security of your original documents is ensured by IPS' Image Track SM software, a database-driven control system for the document conversion process that ensures the security and integrity of original documents and scanned images. For each document, Image Track records the time, date and responsible operator or clerk at each step in the document conversion process, from delivery and preparation to testing, uploading and return to the client or third-party storage facility. Quality assurance is provided by extensive control reports produced on any schedule desired. The result is a document conversion audit trail for every document that passes through the hands of IPS.
We'll talk more about access and storage security in our next issue.
IPS Produces 100 Millionth Image for Ohio Bureau of Workman's Compensation
The Information Technology Division of the Ohio Bureau of Workman's Compensation recently announced the achievement of a major milestone: the imaging of its 100 millionth page in a statewide document management system that was ten years in the making. Users of the Bureau's system are currently viewing over 2 million pages per month, all in digital format.
So exactly how big is 100 million? If all of the sheets were placed end-on-end at the 45th parallel - that is, near Fargo, ND or Montreal, Canada - they would circle the earth. Or placed in a stack, they would reach one mile higher than Mount Everest. Their combined weight would be one million pounds. Even in digital form, it would take over 7,500 CDs to contain the pages, and one person would spend almost ten years in order to view each page for one second of an 8-hour working day.
Imaging Terms You Should Know
Barcode: Consists of a series of thin and thick black lines that when placed in defined patterns represent a numeric or alphabetic character. Various symbologies identify the defined patterns. Barcodes can be one-dimensional -- like the ones found on retail packages or two-dimensional (known as 2D). 2D barcodes, which consist of a matrix of black and white blocks can contain large amounts of information. Popular formats used in imaging are Code39, Code128, Codabar, Code2 of 5, Code 93, UPC, EAN and Postnet code.
Batching: Collecting multiple pages together and separating with batch separators. Batches are either fixed quantities of single pages that can be counted to identify double feeds (see autofeeders), or consist of multiple levels often based on three levels of index. Recently there has been some interest in using color-coded bars scanned with a color scanner to identify batches.
Pixel: The basic building block of all images - a simple dot. In bi-tonal images, it is merely a black or white dot (see "Bi-tonal" definition above). In grey scale images, dots will have between 1-to-256 possible values of grey (for an 8-bit grey scale image).
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