OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Just a week ago, Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, GA became the latest victim of a major data breach involving protected health information (PHI). The health network announced it was unable to locate 10 computer discs containing PHI for more than 300,000 patients treated between 1990 and 2007.

According to a local news article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Emory President and CEO John Fox admitted that the discs had not been properly stored. Although they were in an office with restricted access and nightly lockdown, the cabinet they were in was not locked.

We can hope that the discs were simply misplaced rather than stolen or destroyed, but incidents like this still occur far too often in the healthcare industry. At risk is not only the privacy of the patients whose health information could now be anywhere, but also Emory itself, because it is bound by strict regulatory mandates like HIPAA and HITECH. Non-compliance can result in crippling fines and a loss of public confidence. Emory has already committed to providing identity theft resources to all of the affected patients.

This latest breach comes just six months after an internal breach in which an employee perhaps unwittingly printed medical records that eventually found their way to an identity theft ring. Nine of 32 affected patients reported that their identities had been stolen, and Emory alerted another 7,200 patients who had been in their care at the time. All told, industry analysts calculate the average cost per breached document at $240. Though the employee was let go, Emory spokesperson Lance Skelly said the printed documents were within the scope of the employee’s job duties. In other words, the paper was the problem. To see how OpenText helps medical facilities of all sizes tackle this issue, watch last month’s webcast with TMCnet.

While many healthcare providers are making great strides in effectively managing today’s patient information, how many of them are effectively evaluating the risk associated with “misplacing” historic documents that fall outside the scope of their EMR deployment? For many organizations, it’s unlikely that their next data breach will result from a virus or a group of teenage hackers. The real threat may simply come from the theft of unattended paper documents or an overzealous cleaner diligently “cleaning up.”

OpenText has a solution designed for problems exactly like this. Alchemy, our document server solution, can capture document images from paper or just about any electronic file format, file them or route them to specific users, and track every instance of access: where, when, and who sees them. Had the files on those discs or the leaked paper medical records been scanned into Alchemy, the physical media could have been safely destroyed and Emory would be in the clear.

Click here to check out Alchemy’s latest release, version 9.0.

Tens of thousands of businesses around the world already use OpenText’s Alchemy Server to manage their critical documents. On April 18, 2012 new features in the areas of capture, access, workflow and retention were released as Alchemy 9.0. See the full press release here.

Alchemy 9.0 is a simple solution for managing documents. Any business that relies on thorough and precise tracking of records will benefit from Alchemy’s unique capabilities. Here are a few of them:

• Alchemy 9.0 captures and archives paper or electronic documents from MFP, desktop, back-office and third-party applications.

• All of your documents reside in a single, centralized database.

• Full-text search allows “Google-style” search of all documents just by plugging in a word or phrase.

• Alchemy 9.0 helps you create simple workflows so documents are automatically routed to the correct decision-makers depending on their status (e.g. “accepted” or “rejected”).

• Retention utilities let you manage the lifecycle of your documents from creation to deletion based on any criteria you choose (e.g. you can tell Alchemy to delete certain records days, weeks, months or years after a chosen event).

Immediate benefits include reduced payroll burn from manual document management like faxing and filing; reduction of paper and paper-related supplies; less hardware and maintenance on MFPs and fax machines; and audit-readiness for less risk of compliance failure.

Alchemy is particularly useful for small- to medium-sized businesses with an internal or mandated need for secure document management. Healthcare, legal, financial and manufacturing institutions in particular face severe fines for improper, inaccurate or incomplete document access and management.

We are very excited about this release and the enhanced capabilities of Alchemy 9.0, and you should be too!

Check us out at http://getdocumentmanagement.com or to view more fax and document solutions, see OpenText’s full suite at http://faxsolutions.opentext.com.

Darren Boynton
Product Marketing Manager
OpenText Corporation

As much as it appears that the information we create, receive and use is becoming prevalently digital, I still seem to be getting an overwhelming amount of post pushed through my letterbox each morning. Of the mail I receive, 60% is unwanted, 35% comes from the same providers I signed up with online (with new offers to help me increase those bills even further) and then there are the postcards from Grandparents and an occasional copy of Wired magazine.

Aside from the needless destruction of our planet’s natural resources, there is also the issue of content responsibility. In many cases, the unwanted mail I receive contains information which collectively provides more data about me than I am comfortable sharing with the neighbor across the road who can be frequently found going through my trash looking for cans to recycle (there is a whole other blog article there). All this means that I spend far more time than I should, vetting my mail to determine what should be kept, what should be recycled and most importantly, what should be shredded. As frustrating as this may be, what happens when it’s not simply a family of three dealing with their mail but a company of fifty or five hundred employees drowning in documents from countless sources?
 
Do you have enough information on your information? 

Image Credit: Seth Anderson

Organizations have to not only contend with incoming mail but also all the information that is generated within the company; financial transactions, HR files, out bound customer correspondence, legal agreements, the list is endless.

And while businesses will be equally sensitive about the sanitization of company documents they are (or should be) more concerned again with the accountability and responsibility that comes with holding on to that information. In many cases, transactional and/or confidential documents need to be kept for prescribed periods of time and then destroyed according to a rigid schedule. If your business is impacted by MoReq, HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11, Sec 17a, DoD 5015.2, UCC, Sarbanes-Oxley, UETA, ANSI, NARA, ISO 15489, VERS or FRCP then you are already aware of these significant challenges. If you are lucky enough to have made it through that list unscathed, there will likely be local, regional or national mandates on the usage, storage and disposition of specific types of documents. And lastly, there are your own internal policies that dictate how particular kinds of information need to be managed.
 
Getting Document Retention Right

If you have been researching this subject you will know that there is lot of information out there that discusses the setting up of retention and disposition plans which (when correctly deployed) do a reasonable job of managing the overall document lifecycle. What a lot of these approaches lack however, is a focus on the very beginning of the document lifecycle. The criteria for document destruction are often based on assessing the characteristics of each document. This means that the success of your retention plan is entirely based on the metadata collected about the document at the time it was indexed. This becomes particularly important when dealing with documents that rarely touched once they are captured. If your indexing process lacks accuracy or, you fail to capture the right data, your retention solution will never be the right solution. Also consider how retention requirements have changed over the last ten years. If past behavior is indicative of future behavior then expect to see increasingly stringent regulations going forward. Prepare for it now by setting up a comprehensive capture strategy rather than a “get-by” approach.

Image Credit: Gerwin Sturm

Most importantly, ensure that your solution for document retention is transparent and understandable by normal human beings.  It’s very easy to find your organization flying down an over-zealous formal records management rabbit hole. This might make for a great insurance policy on paper but will likely struggle to work as a solution that can move and bend as the business and external regulations evolve.

Suddenly those six Pottery Barn catalogs and fourteen credit card offers seem less of a burden…

Go to the Google books web site and search for “The Internet For Dummies” By John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young. If you then search for the word “social” Google will tell you that there are 39 occurrences spread across 432 pages. Our friends in Mountain View are always good for an easy warm-up session that doesn’t tax the body too much.

Let’s try a similar exercise on a much larger scale. Jog over to your IT department and nimbly request access to all fax documents your organization has ever sent or received which contain the vendor ID for the company that supplies your office with staplers. For many firms this request will give you more than enough time to catch your breath and perhaps write a book yourself. While it’s great for one’s cardiovascular system, searching for highly specific snippets of information in large, unmanaged repositories is frequently an exhausting, overwhelming and imprecise process.

Even though many organizations have taken steps to better manage their inbound and outbound fax communication, a large percentage still haven’t installed measures that enable them to maintain a long term, secure archive of searchable fax documents. This seemingly minor omission in a corporate information management strategy is unfortunately capable of doing much damage when the time comes to respond to an audit or discovery request. Conversely, not having a complete grip on those information assets can prevent companies from identifying documents that may strengthen their position in legal disputes or, assist in resolving issues concerning costly business transactions.

Introducing a dedicated fax archive into your fax management solution substantially mitigates many of the risks associated with the long term management of high volumes of fax documents. By deploying an archive which performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on faxes on their way into the archive, IT organizations can be confident that they can quickly search through the entire contents of the archive for faxes containing a particular set of characters, words or phrase. This granular level of indexing often proves far more useful than narrow searching on fax header data many companies are limited to today. In those cases where faxes need to be provided to an external party, a well-managed archive will allow for rapid retrieval and multiple distribution options such as burning to optical media, sending to portable storage devices or uploading to FTP sites. In short, the fax archive provides a safe, accessible haven for faxes ensuring they remain as a long-term asset rather than a future liability.

OpenText customers have long been able to deploy highly searchable archiving capabilities using RightFax’s sister product, OpenText Alchemy. As of March 15^th 2011 those RightFax users who have not yet added an archive safety-net will be able to do so by selecting one of four new RightFax Archiving bundles. The “Basic” bundle will provide core capabilities for the smaller RightFax systems with the “Standard”, “Professional” and “Advanced” editions providing increased recognition capacity along with more advanced encryption and access features.

I am confident that reading through the last 508 words has provided more than enough exercise for the day but for those of you who need to “feel the burn” a little more, why not push your body to the limits by reaching out to your OpenText partner for more information on these forthcoming RightFax Archiving bundles?

This article has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease (unless it’s fax related in which case we’ll fetch our scalpels)

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Yesterday the Associated Press reported on some twenty two million e-mails that had been lost by the White House during the Bush administration and, part of the Obama administration. The article can be found at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34419592/ns/politics

Issues relating to e-mail archival reportedly go back several years with Microsoft being called in at some point in 2003 to help with the recovery. The issue became publicly known in 2006 as part of the investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The report suggests that the White House was aware of the need for an appropriate records keeping system but for whatever reason chose to do nothing.

It would be extremely easy to castigate the White House for their failings surrounding their records keeping but how many other organizations are in the same boat today? Let’s also consider the larger matter of “information management”. This article is focusing on a case relating to e-mail archival. The reality is that e-mail is just one form of communication and documentation that needs to be brought under control. How quickly can most companies produce faxes, scanned documents, word processing files, spreadsheets, presentations, computer generated reports or a litany of other document types should they be mandated to do so?

There are several lessons we can learn for a story like this. The first is that anyone can find themselves in a situation where not being able to produce information can be potentially fatal to their operation. This matter is not solely the preserve of public companies. Whether it’s an IRS auditor or, a discovery request from the legal counsel of an ex-employee, customer, partner or vendor, saying “sorry, can’t find them” rarely provides the fast track to a positive outcome.

The second lesson is, don’t wait! Ask anyone who has adopted a formal document/e-mail/records management strategy and they will tell you how much extra effort is involved in getting the historical “back file” data into the repository. Your back file may consist of boxes in a warehouse, folders that live on the floors of offices throughout the building or “that place where Diane takes the old files”. If you have a substantial back file, decide on how you are going to incorporate those records into the solution or, define a process for working with them outside of the system. Avoid a situation where information access is a breeze – providing you are looking for records created after 2008.

Lastly, consider the ramifications of doing nothing. Doing nothing is the largest competitor to any software sale and the silent enemy of the end-user. What would the grand total come to for lost business, reputation damage, legal fees, court fines and, settlements? You may not be the White House but your house is the most important house. Spend the time to understand what controls you have in place to effectively archive and protect the information that runs your business.

We have published a new streamline guide related to document repository issues. You can download it here for free.

Written by Darren Boynton with Open Text’s Fax & Document Distribution Group.

With the holidays just around the corner we find the amount of mail we receive sky-rocketing. From greetings cards to catalogs and brochures, it’s not long before the paper mountain starts taking shape. Depending on where you live in the world your own letterbox maybe a slot in the front door or, a box outside your home or, on the street. These designs have been around for years and continue to serve as a dependable way for homes to collect their mail. The common mailbox however, was never designed to act as a long term storage area for mail. Depending on your own particular model they either become full or, prevent you from being able to open your front door. For most of us this never becomes an issue as we continue to use a tried and tested process to manage our mail. This process normally involves removing the mail from the collection point, distributing items to particular people in the household and recycling those pieces we no longer need. When managing e-mail we adopt similar processes that enable us to store and manage emails away from the server. So why do so many companies continue to burden their fax servers with the long term accumulation of faxes at the point of capture? While the prospect of succumbing to a lethal avalanche of kitchenware catalogs is unlikely, mistaking your fax server for a document repository can have some negative effects of its own.

Compliance Considerations

Let’s talk about compliance for a minute. Compliance may be a term that many of us have become anesthetized to, but the fact remains that non-compliance can be costly and potentially fatal to a business. Whether compliance relates to specific regulations, audit requests or legal discovery, a company’s ability to provide faxes related to a given transaction, process or case can mean the difference between a negligible business interruption and operational standstill. Unfortunately, solutions for compliance only reach the top of an organization’s priority list once they find themselves subject to fines and legal action, by which point it’s often too late. (We have published a new white paper on how fax servers are critical for compliance efforts.)

Efficiently Managing and Archiving Fax Documents

Compliance aside, there are other reasons that should motivate an organization to transition documents away from the fax server and into a secure, searchable and auditable repository. How a business categorizes its faxes impacts how usable and “findable” those faxes becomes in the future. By leaving documents on the fax server we are essentially categorizing information by fax recipient. So what happens when an employee takes on a new position or separates from the organization? Given the volume of faxes that can be received each day how quickly can we really find that individual fax that references the customer account number solely in the body of the document? Searching for faxes in these scenarios can quickly become distracting and more importantly, expensive. It’s also worth considering that not having the right information to hand can quickly result in an organization finding itself at a strategic disadvantage in negotiations and business conflicts.

Just like that trusty mail box and the corporate e-mail server, the fax server was never designed to act as a long term repository so, relying on it to sort, manage, secure and share documents is a strategy we might all consider avoiding. One strategy worth considering however is that of fax archiving. Fax archives not only provide a long term storage solution for fax documents but also dramatically increase the value of the faxes themselves. By attaching a document archive they are quickly able to:

• Create secure repositories for fax storage
• Audit document access and usage by user
• Use OCR to extract text from fax images, making them highly searchable
• Age, retain and dispose of faxes according to company policy or regulation
• Share fax documents across the organization
• Make documents accessible in Microsoft SharePoint and across the web
• Relate faxes to other business documents
• Create and distribute offline fax archives to third parties
• Refocus Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition on executing fax capture and management processes versus fax storage

Many Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition users pair Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition with their fax server. To decide if your organization will benefit from implementing a fax archive, ask yourself the following questions:

• Could your company ever find itself having to fulfill requests to provide fax documents to a third party such as an auditor, legal counsel or regulatory body?
• Are your faxes subject to regulations or policies that dictate their retention and/or disposition?
• Do faxes need to be shared amongst users in order to execute or support a business process?

If you answered YES to one or more of these questions you might consider attaching a document archive to your fax server. For a datasheet on Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition visit here.

We also have an updated overview on the Document Server, Alchemy Edition Connector for Fax Server, RightFax Edition available here.

Written by Darren Boynton with the Open Text Fax and Document Distribution Group.

Paying invoices in inevitable. The way in which organizations pay invoices today wildly differs. While most companies have a formalized or semi-formalized method to approve and pay invoices, these methods often fall victim to missing documents and delays in user execution. These inefficiencies can create cash flow issues, credit problems, missed opportunities for vendor discounts and potentially, an inability to effectively pass audits. By utilizing Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition, businesses can capture and store invoices and their related documents, enabling users to centrally access these documents in a secure and managed environment. This article explores a few of the challenges our AP departments face every day and introduces a cost effective solution for companies looking to keep on top of their back office processes.

The Challenge

Invoice processing is a critical operation and extremely document intensive, relying on paper from multiple sources arriving through a variety of delivery channels. In an unmanaged, manual environment it can become extremely challenging for AP Clerks to track documents related to a specific invoice. Missing documents prevent users from effectively reconciling invoices, purchases orders, packing slips and other items required to process an invoice. In cases where all the documents are present, workers are still required to walk the paper from desk to desk in order for an invoice to be approved or disputed.

So my invoice process is inefficient – does it really matter?

Inefficiencies in processing invoices leads your organization to not only miss out on valuable early payment discounts from the vendor but also opens you up to late fees and may, block you ability to accurately contest invoices from vendors. This situation will not only adversely affect cash flow but often leads to strained relationships with vendors resulting in unfavorable credit terms. In today’s economy paying late often means paying more. If your business exists in a regulated industry, struggles to verify transactions related to company operations may open the door to increased risk of imposed business restrictions, fines, and even legal action.

Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition – Capture, share and process invoices securely

Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition enables organizations to capture and store invoices along with other documents relating to the transaction. Invoices can be automatically delivered to secure repositories structured by vendor, department, cost center, in fact any model adopted by the AP department. Documents can be viewed, annotated, transitioned to the next stage in the invoice approval process, filed for dispute or sent to management for payment authorization. Document Server is easy to configure, enabling users to work with a solution that mimics their manual environment without the traditional bottle necks and choke points. Documents can be accessed across the web or distributed using any kind of removable media meaning those involved in the process can participate through a variety of channels.

What this means for you

Organizations who streamline their invoice processing operation with Document Server can reduce the costs associated with managing vendor payments. The cost to process each invoice will significantly drop as the time and expense involved with validating and routing invoices and associated documents is slashed. Working with a central view of all the documents relating to specific transaction allows the business to swiftly contest incorrect invoices, avoiding needless overpayments. From a compliance perspective, organizations will be able to accurately support all financial reporting with their ability to locate those supporting documents in a few simple clicks.

Invoice Processing is one example of how Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition enables businesses to transform document intensive operations and reduce operating costs. To find out more about Document Server contact Open Text or one of our global partners.

We have a web demo on Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition (formerly Captaris Alchemy) located here.

Written by Darren Boynton with Open Text’s Fax and Document Distribution Group. (Formerly Captaris)