Asserting itself in a market that's become more and more crucial for healthcare, IBM is making a play in the area of data capture with its announcement Tuesday that it will acquire Datacap Inc., a privately-held company based in Tarrytown, NY.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Datacap makes software that enables organizations to transform the way they capture, manage and automate the flow of business information to improve business processes, reduce paper costs or manual errors and meet compliance mandates.
The acquisition will strengthen IBM’s ability to help paper intensive industries like healthcare providers and payers digitize, manage and automate their information assets. Additionally, regulations such as HIPAA have demanded new standards and now legislation is encouraging the adoption of new records management solutions, including scanning and capture to increase accuracy, lower costs and speed business processes to meet these regulations.
“Transforming the way organizations do business requires not only a powerful and flexible technology platform to accommodate the wide range of business requirements, challenges and goals, but also a deep understanding of the processes of the industries in which our clients operate,” said Ron Ercanbrack, vice president of enterprise content management for IBM. "We’ve chosen to make Datacap's approach the foundation of IBM's document capture strategy.”
Datacap customers are leaders in using document capture and enterprise content management solutions to streamline and transform their businesses. More than 200 clients are using Datacap software to help capture and manage their data. These include the Chicago Department of Public Health, and St. Vincent Hospital and Health Care Center and BlueCross BlueShield of Arizona.
Companies today are grappling with managing unstructured data while trying to reduce costs at the same time. It’s estimated that 15 petabytes of new information is being generated daily, and 80 percent of this new information is unstructured content. Datacap software supports image and data entry automation for most types of documents and forms, including medical claims and other highly variable documents such as invoices and shipping documents for more precise business outcomes.
As healthcare organizations seek to streamline processes, lower costs and improve care, extracting meaningful information from unstructured content – both paper and electronic – is critical. Datacap speeds this process by automating the conversion of both structured and highly variable formats into actionable insight in seconds, company executives say.
This capability, which accelerates the dissemination of information throughout an organization by helping to eliminate the physical handling of information, makes it easier for small-to-medium sized practices and small departments or global organizations to extract analytics faster and transform their business processes.
For example, healthcare providers looking to implement an electronic health record system can replace inefficient manual processes for capturing images of medical claims, correspondence, medical reviews and enrollment forms with an automated input system that improves accuracy while reducing manual labor. The ability to capture and store medical records, encounter forms, and lab results in electronic form is a key factor in the modernization of healthcare.
Datacap further extends IBM’s industry leading set of solutions to help companies make better decisions faster by managing content, optimizing processes and enabling compliance through ECM solutions and advanced case management.
Datacap’s client and partner investments in existing IBM and Datacap technologies will be preserved, allowing customers to take advantage of the broader set of capabilities without the need to replace existing systems.
"Datacap has developed the most advanced and flexible document capture platform on the market today," said Scott Blau, former CEO of Datacap and now director of enterprise content management for IBM. "By teaming with IBM, we will now have the reach to satisfy customer demand around the globe. After 15 years partnering with IBM, we’ll hit the ground running with products that are tightly integrated into the IBM ECM offerings and can compete across the board in document capture.”
