SoluSoft Technologies

Document Manangement System with N2 DMS

eCTD Compliance and 21 CFR P 11

December 7th, 2010

Tech Trends in Healthcare Industry – A viewpoint

Information Technology has been adapted by almost all industries including healthcare. Healthcare Industry is depended on IT for internet, computing systems, streamline business processes, clinical trial management, communication systems, healthcare information systems and many such health care applications.

Summary

Information Technology has been constantly evolving itself to cater the needs to core industries including healthcare. IT started with simple management of computer systems in organizations which advanced to network administration, healthcare application and now advance Hi-Tech gadgets that makes life easier for doctors, nurses and patients.

IT has added enormous business values to healthcare industry that leads to benefits such as faster patient throughput, advanced diagnosis, streamlined processes that reduces manpower requirement, provides accurate prediction, and patient information management for years. IT has become a Save our Souls (SOS) for patients by enabling cases to be virtually diagnosed and operated from overseas.

Over the years IT has offered many innovative solutions to healthcare industry. This whitepaper aims to articulate latest trend of Business Process Automation using BPM tools in healthcare industry.

The Tech Capsule:

Enormous power is hidden under this capsule known as “Technology”. Over the years healthcare industry has tasted few of its solutions. One of the major solutions is “Information Management System” (IMS). With the implementation of various application based on IMS, patient record management, healthcare research and trial information is stored in a well defined format.

Hospitals are spending quantum money in implementing technology as they are well convinced about the success of these systems. Many hospitals including Apollo hospitals, Wockhardt and Fortis have been the pioneers of this initiative.

A decade after the Y2K, Technology has yet another powerful solution that helps manage the industry intellectual information in a structured format, streamline business processes and builds a transparent business enterprise through reporting and charting. This solution is known as “Business Process Management” (BPM)

Business Process Management in Healthcare

Companies that have used BPM tools have noted significant advantage in terms of cost savings, time and return on investments. BPM tools are a powerful way of executing business processes seamlessly and help companies outperform in their core business.

Business Process Management [BPM] does not represent any specific application or software, BPM is a concept that deals with methods, processes, applications and tools that help manage business processes efficiently and enable a complete transparent business process execution. Accordingly BPM could be defined as an effective way of managing business processes within team, department, company and enterprise wide with prime goal of increasing efficiency, innovation and customer satisfaction which is achieved using BPM tools for automating, improvement and optimization of business processes such as process based application including workflow engine, content management including document management and content management systems, collaborative tools such as discussions, forums and team sites and business intelligence and analytics through reports and dashboards.

The companies transforming from manual process to processes using BPM tools have identified many advantages. Three best advantages among them are: Firstly, streamline of existing business processes to build a transparent execution in a well defined manner. Secondly, Ability of the enterprise to be responsive to any changes adapted in a cost effective manner through simulation aiding constant optimization of the business process. Thirdly, achieve faster and better Return on Investment [ROI] for the enterprise.

BPM has become vital part of the Healthcare industry. People Process, Place and Products are so closely interlinked with each other that without efficient steering using BPM tools, healthcare IT systems will fall apart and ultimately fail

Hospitals deploy BPM system to improve their quality of services offered to patients by streamlining supporting processes from patient information management to vendors dealing with pharmaceutical products and medicines.

Clinical Research Organizations (CRO) use this newly emerging BPM (Business Process Management) enabled solutions to manage, optimize and automate the clinical trial processes across the studies.

Medical Representatives and Organizations (MR) use BPM tools such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to manage relationship with their customers, send newsletters and automate relationship management

Drug Manufacturing Companies have been using BPM systems to automate business processes between departments, and manage their unstructured information using Workflow and Document Management Systems [WDMS]

What is BPM?
Business Process Management is a proactive way of managing business processes in a department or enterprise wide to increase efficiency, productivity, innovation, customer satisfaction by automating, improving or optimizing business processes. It is used to create, enhance, monitor, analyze, control and optimize operational business processes by utilizing people, process, and technology.
Business Process Management can be used to distribute work within an organization to different work groups, where specialized processing can take place. Process Management routes data, referenced by process instances, to designated people or activities, where predefined rules are applied and actions are performed based on specified conditions.
• BPM tools help resolve many IT issues such as central management of data, increasing transparency in execution, flexibility for easy adaptability to business needs, easy integration of other applications within the enterprise through Service Oriented Architecture [SOA]. BPM enables to have a common platform for communication between all IT applications within the enterprise.
• BPM helps enterprise to add value to the services offered to customers through competitive differentiation with other vendors
• BPM enables enterprise to reduce overall cost in execution of business operations
• Tight integration of all team, departments, companies and enterprise globally through BPM
• BPM helps build and optimize business processes
Once BPM systems are implemented at production level, it can deliver detailed view of business performance, this helps organization to optimize their business processes and achieve better cost savings.

Business Process Management is implemented by breaking large and complicated processes into small sub processes each of which has a state/activity. A state/activity represents a particular stage where an action needs to be performed by a person or a team. Based on the intelligent decisions made at the stage the process is routed to another stage. A close monitoring of these states/activity using BPM reporting tools, helps enterprise analyze the performance of a process at each level. Constant improvisation through innovation and simulation enables achievement of ultimate success that is in the form of tangible and intangible benefits. The entire process includes content, documents, collaborative tools and business intelligence tools.

Components of BPM
A BPM suite consists of four vital components that help in gaining an advantage:
• Business Process and Rules [BPR] – An interface for modeling and executing business process and rules including workflows using BPM tools such as Microsoft Visio, Workflow Designers and Process Engines. BPM tools help simulate business processes and improve them at each stage of the process.

• Enterprise Content Management [ECM] – A system that helps manage enterprise level documents in a central storage system in a well structured format using BPM tools for scanning, indexing, document management and archiving. Documents such as images and other intellectual information are digitized and stored into the ECM with industry compliance and security.

• Collaboration Tools [CT] — A platform enabling communication and collaboration between team, departments, company and enterprise through intranet email and messaging system, discussion forums, dynamic workspace and team sites.

• Business Intelligence [BI] — BI tools generate transparent reporting of the productivity of the enterprise. This BPM tool enables improving efficiency of processes and achieves desirable ROI. BOM tools such as dynamic reporting and dashboards help real-time monitor of business processes, identify trends and opportunities for optimization of business processes.

Business Values
BPM technology for healthcare solutions will enable you to achieve the following:

• Enhanced R&D productivity
• Reduction in time-to-market for new drug/device and improvement in supply chain efficiencies
• Accurate diagnostics and quality treatments
• Accurate reimbursements
• Cost-effective and efficient operations

Benefits
BPM in the Healthcare Industry can create focused, effective, and sustained practice that can enable companies to implement systems that will make them more successful, efficient, and profitable to achieve the following benefits:

• Measurable Return of Investment
• Increased Efficiency
• Process agility through continuous improvement
• Ease of Use
• Better Reporting
• Improved Management Insight
• Ensure Critical Failure Avoidance
• Best of Breed Product Mix
• More Effective Departmental Communication
• Integrated Systems across the Corporation
• Secure Data Shared with the Right Users when they need it
• Faster Product Approval from Regulatory Agencies
• Elimination or minimization of regulatory risks
• Enforcement of best practices
Case Study
1. Charge Master Tracking Process:
o Problem:
 In order to correctly bill a patient, it is important to maintain all bills and expenses incurred during a patients stay in the hospital. This process was paper driven. There was no clear visibility or escalations in bill approvals with patients.
o Solution:
 Using BPM tools, a process is implemented whereby request for charging is done through a charge number initiation
 This process included alerts and escalations that enabled transparency in billing and approvals between hospitals and patients

2. Incident Reporting Process
o Problem
 Incidents within the hospitals with regards to patient care needs to be reported immediately. The existing process which was manual involved manual form filling and researching of such incidents which were cumbersome and time consuming.

o Solution
 A web based Electronic form implemented using BPM tools enabled instant submission of such incidents which were routed through responsible authorities.
 Proper notifications were implemented
 This helped risk management, audit reporting as well as evaluating such incidents and finding ways to overcome it.
3. Approval Process
o Problem
 There are many such approval processes in admin and purchase department which were paper based and consumed noticeable time for authority approvals and response.
 No alerts and escalations were available
o Solution
 A workflow that automated these processes has brought in signification reduction in time taken for authority approvals.
 Due to alerts and escalations, proper actions were taken by next in line authorities in case of negligence.

Return on Investment
Our ROI calculator has estimated a saving of USD 2, 84, 375 during the first year itself in a company that converts its paper based processing system into a Business Process System. The figures are estimated based on 50 user concurrent license BPM system for a pharmaceutical based company with its business processes functional over a decade.

About SoluSoft
SoluSoft is a software and services company that provides business process solutions to 2000 companies. SoluSoft has offices in the US and India and partners in a number of countries worldwide. The customer driven solutions they provide enable businesses to unlock new levels of information integration, allow collaborative governance, and provide knowledge-based decision making to achieve new levels of performance.
SoluSoft Inc. SoluSoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
300, Willow Street South A-704/705, Shapath IV,
North Andover, MA 01845 S.G. Highway,
Ahmedabad-380051, Gujarat, India.
Tel: (978) 681-6600
Fax: (978) 688-4884 Tel: (91) 79-30073211/12
http://www.solu-soft.com http://tech.solusofttech.com

About Author
Mr. Royson Rajan- Vice President
Vice President, SoluSoft Technologies Pvt Ltd with over six years computer graphics software experience including Application development, Imaging system, business process automation. His responsibility included Business management, Project management, and Project leadership, Architecture, Design and Development. He initiates and leads projects from business requirements through post implementation and support. His major achievements includes product architecture, product development, project implementation, project planning, scheduling, organizational and analytical skills, as well as, professionalism when interfacing to all levels of users and organizations.

October 29th, 2010

Managing resumes simplified with Document Management System

The autmn called “recession” is over and the spring called “hiring” is sprouting. World is just beginning to rise from one of the worst double dip recession. Workforces were cut down and employees were laid off left and right during this recession. However companies are now blowing the trumpet called “Recruitment Drive”, but are they armed to manage the first response from a large pool of workforce called “Resumes”

When a classified advertisement for vacancy is posted along with response for contact, enormous resumes are received back. How do we manage these resumes? How can we classify them and shortlist them? How can we retrieve it and grade it?

SoluSoft’s N2 Document Management is the classic solution to address this issue.

Document Management Systems have ability to improve your business processes without changing them too much. This brings in benefit to your organization. DMS streamlines your business process and behaves like a backbone to your business process to which all departments are centrally connected.

When resumes are received; they can be manually uploaded or imported automatically into the document management system. Once stored into the system with proper attributes, life is easy! With a click of a button, you can search the pool of resumes and find the candidate.

SoluSoft’s N2 DMS gives you a facility to create a document type and add custom attributes to your document. One can use this feature to create a document type called “Resume” and add attributes such as “First Name, Last Name, Experience, Expertise, Interview status, Remarks.

Let’s take an example. If we can upload a resume with following credentials

First Name: John

Last Name: Smith

Experience: 5

Expertise: JAVA Software Engineer

Interview Status: Short listed

Remarks: Need to negotiate on salary

Resume Management System

document management software

How easy it is to track this resume from a pool of resumes when you type in search values for Experience as 5 and Expertise as Java Software Engineer. Just in few seconds you will have your candidates resume popped right near your eyes. The best of all is the Remarks attribute that helps you remember your last discussion and status with the candidate.

For years manage these resume and archive them into SoluSoft Document Management System. No hassle and easy retrieval of resumes. Life’s just got simpler with SoluSoft DMS for all HR professionals who spend lots of time is finding our the resumes than actually interviewing the candidates.

Connect to Mr. Royson Rajan, to know more about this Implementation of DMS for your organization. Request for a free demo online to see how it fits your needs. Email rrajan@solu-soft.com for more information

October 29th, 2010

Accelerate your ROI using Document Management System

Experts report that there is a direct relation between the growth of the company and its document generation. As the company grows, it constantly generates document in direct proportionality. Company’s standard documents become more complex as the organization grows and it is necessary for the company to adopt new systems and technology to manage the information efficiently. Managing the information efficiently helps you accelerate your ROI [Return on Investment]. Organizations with structured information management gain extra efficiencies and improved performance. Document Management System can also extend traditional business process to become powerful.

A company begins to achieve profit as soon as it starts building its customer network. Companies generate more documents as soon as customers connect with them. One needs to focus on core business process and intellectual information to cater to the needs to the customer and offer satisfactory services. This brings in ROI against its workforce and all cost associated for proper functioning of business.

However, this can be achieved only when workforce contributes its efforts towards building these intellectual data. However it’s accepted that companies find it difficult to reach the break even point [BEP] and over the years the ROI becomes stagnant.

Few of the reasons why the ROI becomes stagnant is that Firstly, the organization is staff dependent, not all staff is aware of the existence of these intellectual documents and information. As a result they would request regeneration of the information. This means that when customer request for intellectual documents, the workforce recreates the information which is laborious, inefficient process for the staff and the company loses important time in just repetitive work.

Secondly, even when the staff that created the document initially looks for the information they need to send to customer, found it difficult to retrieve it as the documents were stored in an ad hoc unstructured format. The staff needs to manually browse through the entire folder and check each file for retrieving the information. In additional to the important time consumed in searching the document, it isn’t guaranteed that the user would find the document. Business is all about time management and spending long period of unproductive time behind searching information from piles of unstructured information is a costly endeavor.

Thirdly the documents are not labeled properly with version. The documents are not updated on day to day basis as it is a manual process which staff cannot spend time for, consequently this leads to creation of piles of redundant repetitive data and information within the organization. Not to forget, this also consumes space for file storage cabinets.

Over the years these facts result into unproductive efforts of staff which are utilized in searching documents, duplicating documents and managing the unstructured information in an unstructured format. This results into a steady stagnant and later declining ROI of the company.

Document Management System is the accelerator to your company’s ROI. Having documents and information stored in a well structured format helps eliminate all the above three barriers and help achieve fast and steady ROI.

Document Management Systems have ability to improve your business processes without changing them too much. This brings in benefit to your organization. DMS streamlines your business process and behaves like a backbone to your business process to which all departments are centrally connected.

Connect to Mr. Royson Rajan, to know more about Implementation of DMS for your organization. Email rrajan@solu-soft.com for more information

August 19th, 2010

Office Digitization – Creating a paperless work environment

Paper is being used in office in large volume for printing agreements, contracts, memos, invoices, and technical documents that are then stored and circulated within an office.

A statistical analysis of paper helps us understand documents and paper usage in office.

1 scanned page (8 1/2 by 11 inches) (CCITT G4 compressed) = 50 KiloBytes(KByte) (on average)

1 file cabinet (4 drawer) (10,000 pages on average) = 500 MegaBytes (MByte) = 1 CD ROM

2 file cabinets = 1,000 MBytes = 1 GigaByte (GByte); 10 file cabinets = 1DVD

2,000 file cabinets = 1,000 GBytes = 1 TeraByte (TByte); 2,000 file cabinets = 200 DVDs

1 File cabinet with 4 drawers stores 10,000 pages on average. A company with over 5 years of existence would need about 100’s of such file cabinets to store paper results into issues such as space, cost, search and resource dependency. A quick and innovative approach to handle such issues is to digitize the documents and store them in a digital format. 10 file cabinets of papers that can store about 100000 papers can be stored in 1 Gb memory which is much cheaper than cabinets.

The problem with digitization of documents is how does a company which followed paper based environment turn paperless? Enterprise level Scanning and Digitization Solutions (ESDS) proves to be the best fit solution to this problem.

ESDS helps document imaging and paper scanning that will convert all of your office documents, reports, archives and photographs into high-quality digital images. These images can then be stored into memory disks.

“Our Enterprise level scanning solution i2Scan is intelligent enough to scan batch of documents, separate them into different PDF, add custom header and footer and store them in specified locations.” Royson Rajan, vice president, SoluSoft Technologies Pvt Ltd.

As the world moves toward a green environment, save paper, save tree, save world is the global campaign jargon. Offices are being advised to reduce use of paper and create paperless environment. In order to quickly change a paper based environment to paperless environment, an ESDS can make a big difference in your business

March 31st, 2010

Digitalization is green technology for your office

I visited a potential sales prospect a few months ago. Now they are a valued customer. . During my visit, I interacted with the department heads in order to understand their pain points. The shipping department was among the ones I visited. When we started our discussions, I remember the gentleman saying “Help me get rid of the cabinets.”

As we continued our conversation I realized that he was stressed out with paper-based filing cabinets for three reasons

Lack of storage space
They represented a tedious retrieval process
The possibility of natural calamities (e.g., floods, fire, etc.) that pretty much scared him about loosing the documents.

He led me to a big hall with giant size file cabinets on racks and arranged in a massive row. For a moment I baffled and asked him the amount of time it took for a typical retrieval. To which we both laughed.

Every company faces the filing/retrieval issue at some period of time. Offices in paper based environments start with structured procedures, but eventually over the years lose track of the structure due to lack of time, changes in resources and space limitations. My customer was lucky enough to have us walk-in at the right time to handle their racks of documents which were more than 20 years of records. I nickname this situation as “Cabinet Office” where cabinets are the boss!

Green Technology Drive promotes a paperless environment and ironically this happens to be a solution to all offices that undergo “Cabinet Office” like situation. SoluSoft, under its Go Green Technology Drive promotes digitalization of documents.

Let’s take a practical scenario of 1 Terabyte Hard Disk.

1 Tb = 1000 Gb. A Microsoft office file such as a tender or an invoice along with supporting documents might average of 2 mb in file size. Which means 1 Gb has 512 files (1024 Mbs make 1 Gb) and so 1000 Gb has 5,12,000 such tenders or invoice documents stored.

Factoid:

Dimension of 1 Tb HDD will be 12.6 cm (W) x 20.7(D) cm x 4 cm (H).

In a paper based environment 5,12,000 documents would need a living room size space for storage.

Digitalization of document provides three main advantages

Radical reduction in storage space
Cost effectiveness
No deterioration, as with paper documents

SoluSoft has developed a scan solution named as i2Scan that best fits “Cabinet Office” like organizations to help scan and digitalize their documents in batches. I2Scan is an intelligent robot that sits on top of your twain driver supported scanners and creates separate TIFF and PDF documents with automatic document separation, addition of custom header footer, capture content using OCR based technology. With this software our customer was able to digitalize tier documents less than a month.

The first step towards a green office is to get all your paper based documents digitalized. With Digitalization you prevent the document from getting deteriorated as well as being altered or tampered. Electronic Document Storage is far safer than old fashion paper based management. The best of all is that if your document is digitalized in color mode, you can replicate a paper based document whenever you need.

By digitalization of all your paper based documents in office, you not just play your part in Save Environment, Save tree campaign but also save money, space and time. Join me in SoluSoft initiated Go Green Technology Drive and bring value added profits to your business.

About the Author

Royson Rajan heads SoluSoft Technologies India as its Vice President, Engineering. With over 5 years of experience in business process automation, Rajan initiated the SoluSoft Go Green Technology Drive . This program has the goal of sowing the seeds of greener IT products, nurturing and cultivating a green consciousness to help offices reap the benefits of better ROI and a healthier planet.

March 30th, 2010

Building a greener office

Building a greener office

Save Earth, Go green. The concerns of protecting the earth from destruction has become a part of all aspects of our life. Many of us are trying to promote greener environment in our everyday activities. Whether it be our houses, society or workplace the green campaign has reached an all time peak level of awareness.

Five interesting aspects to consider:

•80% of global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, according to the Carbon Trust.

•Envirowise.com states that waste costs money, typically up to 4% of business turnover and by finding ways to reduce waste, your company could become profitable.

• IBM has estimated a saving of $17.8 million in 1991 by encouraging employees worldwide to turn off office equipment and lights when not in use.

•The 1990s was declared as the warmest decade in the century . Most experts are in consensus that the reason behind hotter temperature is due to people burning non renewable fuels like oil, coal and gas that emit heat-trapping, greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

•On average, office equipment are responsible for 16% of an office’s energy use.

Just by practicing and implementing few eco friendly options within your office, you contribute your part for the environment. An office that decides to go greener using innovative IT products is on the winning edge.

Five IT products that can help in building a greener office include:

Office Portal
Scan Stations
Document Management System
Workflow based Business Process Automation
Web Marketing

Step 1: Office Portals

- How do you manage your office announcements? Do you circulate individual memos?

- How do you take care of the time management and the tasks management process? Do you maintain register and paper based application forms?

- How do you issue your payroll statements? Do you print them?

Mass level communications can be implemented using an office portal. With an office portal in place you can set leave (time off rules), automate the leave process (approval and rejection), manage projects and tasks and measure performance using an intranet web based portal.

You ca also calculate payroll and generate e-statements that are issued to employees.

A company intranet portal is an easy way to take the first step to a greener office.

Step 2: Scan Stations

Even in situations where multiple people are working on the same document you do not need to have copies of documents to circulate. For instance, set up Scan Station software that can intelligently scan all hard copies and create digital copies which can then be shared within intranet.

ScanStation software is a good first step in eliminating a paper based environment and creating a greener environment. Work on digital documents till the end of task. And using electronic signatures, print only when a deal is signed.

Step 3: Document Management System

As you begin digitizing your documents and moving your company from a paper based environment to paperless environment, the managing of documents in a well structured manner is the next milestone. A well structured document management system with powerful indexing, full text search, inbuilt viewer, version control, security makes your office more efficient as well as more cost effective.

Step 4: Workflow Business Process Automation

The sharing of digitized documents can be efficiently handled using a document management system. Business process automation can be achieved where documents need be routed to officers based on pre-defined business process. This can be as easy as point-and-click.

Office workflows based on conditions, sequence can be automated with higher accuracy and speed. With proper alerts, escalations and triggers the automated office process makes your office greener in terms of delivery, performance, accuracy and return on investment (ROI).

Step 5: Web Marketing

According to Internet Usage and World Population Statistics (September 30, 2009), out of the world’s population of 6,767,805,208 about 1,733,993,741 are internet users which is about 25.62%. [ reference : http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm ].

Web Marketing has been at the top of the news ever since social networking sites such as Linkedin™, Twitter™, FaceBook™ and Orkut™ became a part of the marketing campaigns of businesses of all size.

Simple Web tweets using twitter can update thousands connected to an enterprise. This approach is proving more effective than spending hundreds or thousands of dollars sending newsletters and snail mails.

A YouTube™ account with your product or company video works much better than a paper based advertisement which limits itself to static visuals with no audio or video. These videos can be presented in an attractive peer-to-peer fashion that fosters a sense of business community.

Just Five Steps will help move your company to a paperless environment, make your office greener; and you will be contributing to saving the environment. As an added benefit, ‘green’ almost always means a higher return on investments (ROI).

About the Author

Royson Rajan heads SoluSoft Technologies India as its Vice President, Engineering. With over 5 years of experience in business process automation, Rajan initiated the SoluSoft Go Green Technology Drive . This program has the goal of sowing the seeds of greener IT products, nurturing and cultivating a green consciousness to help offices reap the benefits of better ROI and a healthier planet.

Summary

In a business context, green equates with improved efficiency and bottom line results. In a personal context it means a healthier planet where our children will enjoy better and longer lives.

March 29th, 2010