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The cost to implement a document imaging system that meets the essential
retrieval requirements for use within the hospital business office will primarily be from ongoing
direct labor to operate the system.
Costs such as equipment and installation are substantial, but they will be dwarfed by the ongoing cost of scanning and indexing
labor (view a detailed list of costs here).
These conclusions are supported by numerous studies, price surveys, costs surveys, and our own experience with the costs of imaging
and managing millions of documents for hospital business offices since 2001.
Technology
A study published by Dr. Susan L. Cisco of the University of Texas Graduate School, "Indexing Digital Documents - It's NOT
An Option - Pay Now, or Pay (More) Later", discusses the difference between startup and labor cost centers. It was
reported that initial purchase costs of systems that process and store 300,000 to 3 million pages per year (which meet the needs
of the hospital business office) averaged $0.15 to $0.25 per page. This comprises the technology cost component.
Document Preparation and Scanning
Scanning labor includes document preparation (removal of staples and paper clips, unfolding of pages, pages organization), scanner set up,
checking the results of the scan, removal of paper and reconstruction of documents after scanning. Average costs for this labor,
including supervision, are $0.12 per page.
Indexing and Quality Assurance
Indexing involves key-entry of all account numbers on a page. The indexer must carefully review the page for account numbers, a task made
more difficult by the huge variety of document formats.
Initial quality control for most in-house systems will require double-entry of all indexes for all pages to check for keying errors.
Quality assurance staff will then process the exceptions, as well as search for any missing documents or pages. Additional labor will
be required to manage both indexing staff and QA staff.
With the index-dense nature of documents, the total indexing and quality assurance costs using highly trained staff are equivalent to
an average of five indexes per page with a total cost of $0.20 per index.
In-House Imaging Costs
Based on the component costs described above, the total in-house imaging cost based on bed size can be calculated. The table below
illustrates these calculations. The average pages per month shown in the table has been calculated from a large statistically valid
sample of actual business office page counts performed by Healthcare Reports since 2001.
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Beds Served by Business Office |
Average Pages Scanned Per Month* |
Technology Costs ($0.20/Page) |
Doc Prep & Scanning Labor ($0.12/Page) |
Indexing and QA Labor** |
Total Monthly Costs |
Total Annual Costs |
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200 |
24,000 |
$4,800 |
$2,880 |
$24,000 |
$31,680 |
$380,160 |
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300 |
36,000 |
$7,200 |
$4,320 |
$36,000 |
$47,520 |
$570,240 |
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400 |
48,000 |
$9,600 |
$5,760 |
$48,000 |
$63,360 |
$760,320 |
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500 |
60,000 |
$12,000 |
$7,200 |
$60,000 |
$79,200 |
$950,400 |
*Average pages per month based on actual data accumulated since 2001
**Double-entry indexing and QA labor = $.20 per index, equivalent of five indexes per page |
As can be seen, the technology costs are much lower than labor costs. An adequate imaging solution must accommodate the large amount of
labor required to create high quality retrieval capabilities.
The centralization and large scale implementation of our services give your business office the ability to meet
high quality retrieval requirements at a dramatically lower cost than the
costs listed above. The centralization of our facilities enables us to keep per-unit processing costs much lower than what
any single business office would incur.
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