Software: Data Grabber Reads Handwriting, Forms
More and more drug orders were arriving at Prescription Solutions, and the tide of paper flowing through the mail-order pharmacy was only getting stronger.
Its Mira Mesa facility had been built to process 6,000 prescriptions during an eight-hour shift. With 20 percent growth, the situation evolved to 14,000 orders and more. One shift became two.
While it did its job, hindsight shows the paper process was “very cumbersome,” said Bill Mickle, the company’s vice president of operations.
These days paper is pass & #233; at the pharmacy, a unit of Orange County-based PacifiCare.
Mechanical, optical and electronic technology , along with human oversight , fills orders at the company’s new Carlsbad mail-order facility.
Efficiency is up, said Mickle.
The prospect of having to fill 3.75 million bottles of medicine per year got Prescription Solutions to consider automating the way it handles paper-based orders.
By the time it was done, it had turned to a Sorrento Mesa company to interpret patient data and instructions for filling medicine bottles.
Shopping around for a computer-based image archive and document management system steered Prescription Solutions to Costa Mesa-based FileNet Corp.
FileNet in turn recommended image capture software from San Diego-based Captiva Software Corp.
Data Grabber
The Captiva product grabs data from images of written materials. Mail-order clothing retailer Lands’ End and California’s Franchise Tax Board also use Captiva’s imaging technology.
Now when orders come in, clerks manually remove staples and creases from paper forms, then put them in the scanner. The Captiva software reads bar codes with 99 percent accuracy and checks boxes with 95 percent accuracy, Mickle said.
It also reads handwriting. Four out of five times it gets that right, he said.
From there the data goes into the mainframe.
Handwriting that the system finds illegible gets sent to a human operator. Company publicists note written information is checked several times, including once by a pharmacist. Another pharmacist inspects the bottle of medicine produced by the automated dispensers.
Data extraction has been a growth business for privately held Captiva. The company reported $21.5 million in revenues during 1999, and grew by about 20 percent in 2000, said a company spokesman.
The company’s 1997-99 results made it No. 11 on the Fast-Growing Private Companies list appearing in the San Diego Business Journal’s 2001 Book of Lists. Captiva does not appear on the latest such list, published in the Business Journal Oct. 1.
Captiva, which now has 162 employees, came together in 1998 with the merger of FormWare Corp. and Wheb Systems, Inc. It traces its beginnings to the start of Utah-based FormWare in 1989.
Blaine Owens is charged with selling Captiva’s software to skeptical customers.
One of the biggest challenges is getting people to trust a new box in their computer room, said Owens, who is Captiva’s vice president of North American sales.
“Is this black box as accurate as my human being? Can it be as intuitive?” Owens said, taking on the voice of a customer.
“And that’s where we have to balance expectations,” he said. “Because to a degree, yes, the black box can in fact emulate human activity. But there’s always that level of cognitive activity that you can’t displace. It’s just not cost-effective to do that.”
In other words, there is still some room for human clerks.
