Freedom Celebrates XX Years!

What has changed with Document Management Systems over the years? We celebrate where we've been and how far we have come

It's hard to believe that 20 years ago a couple of brainy IT guys got together and saw a need for document management software, wrote the program and began promoting and selling it. And today, twenty years later, that same software is still the number one choice for electronic content and document management solutions in many organizations from small private physician practices to Fortune 15 McKesson! We're pretty proud of how far we have come and are even more excited about how far we have to go. There is still so much more on the horizon. With the ever changing climate of healthcare; ICD-10 rolling out shortly, meaningful use requirements and interoperability — there continues to be much room for advancement, improvement and our RICAR (Record Image Capture And Retrieval) software continues to stay relevant and innovative.

In 1995, RICAR was promoted and used to capture documents, primarily in laboratories. The laboratory requisitions were scanned, alleviating the need for the storage of all those documents as well as expediting the processing of claims through the ability to quickly view and route them. Companies typically saw a ROI within the first six months.

Today, twenty years later, RICAR still is used to capture those scanned documents but now it is used to capture digital as well as electronic documents. Documents that arrive in your office, laboratory or clinic via, email, digital fax, laboratory information system (LIS), health information system (HIS) can be captured and routed for data entry and auditing.

RICAR can accept any file including, but not limited to; Word, Excel, PDF, TIFF, JPEG, CSV, XML, 835 or HL7. And what is truly exciting and groundbreaking right now is the ability for laboratories and healthcare providers that accept HL7 files, can now produce a human readable document with the addition of our HL7 Processing Engine. So, when an order, requisition or form goes missing it can now be recreated. Or imagine this, a form or requisition comes through with missing information but your data entry clerk doesn't catch it. In the past, or perhaps you're experiencing this now, these orders get pushed through the process where they sit — not getting noticed until much later in the billing process. So claims are getting unnecessarily denied and doubling your efforts. With RICAR's HL7 processing engine, we have written a program that has rules built into it — that will “catch” those HL7 files with missing information and reroute to a queue for further processing. The beauty of this is an almost immediate impact on your Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) — revenue increased — talk about great ROI!

Storage solutions have also evolved over the years. In the beginning Freedom stored documents…

Today, the storage options available to you are flexible so you can minimize the costs associated with storing electronic files. The storage options are vast and versatile and are constructed to run in a physical, virtual or cloud environment. We configure our solutions so they operate using shared storage structures our customers currently have deployed, including a Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Area Storage (NAS), within server storage (RAID) and cloud storage solutions. And if that wasn't enough options for you, Freedom has a HIPAA/PCI/SOX compliant state of the art third-party data center available as well.

INNOVATION

Our programmers are currently working on new innovative solutions to continue to provide our customers with the best, most efficient electronic content document management software. What makes us continue to stand out from the rest of the content and document providers is the same today as it was 20 years ago. We customize our solutions to meet our customer's needs. If our system doesn't currently address all your needs — we create an add-on piece to make it function and deliver the way you need it to.

We currently are working with a customer in Michigan who asked us if we could help them resolve issues they are experiencing within Central Scheduling. We are creating an add-on to their RICAR software that will pull in the ordering requisition from patient provider/physician offices as an HL7 file from their NextGen EMR. The requisition is then routed to the Central Scheduling department into a workflow work queue. The schedulers will now be able to pull up a Freedom generated form — physician requisition and schedule that patient's procedures without searching through file folders or layers upon layers of computer files. There is no manual indexing — it's all automated! After scheduling the appointment, RICAR is set up to automatically print the order at the patients' procedure location the day before the appointment. When the patient arrives for their appointment — the order is right there at their fingertips — for viewing or printing within seconds! Time saved… happy patient — happy employee — happy physician.

There's a lot more innovation going on — follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay on top of our progress and be the first to know!

Freedom Imaging Systems has been a leader in the field of document management since 1995 when they created the first version of RICAR (Record Image Capture And Retrieval), their breakthrough document management solution.

Evolving with the dynamic industry of enterprise content management, Freedom offers small and large businesses alike the tools they need to streamline their business processes with workflow (FreeWf). In addition to providing everything a business needs to collect, capture, store and manage data of any kind, Freedom workflow solutions help organizations improve efficiency, reduce costs, improve quality control and facilitate document storage and content management needs.

RICAR is fully scalable and is easily modified to fit the needs of any type of business. RICAR processes and manages all types of documents ranging from employment applications to explanation of benefits records. RICAR is a software system that can be utilized among many fields and across every department. RICAR also provides users with a complete audit trail making regulatory compliance effortless.

For additional information please contact:
Freedom Imaging Systems
Phone: 734-327-5600
Freedom Contact page