Healthcare / Medical
Federal mandates require that doctors, dentists and medical facilities dispose of their hazardous and medical waste properly—and keep waste manifests for up to three years to prove it.
Problems arose when city and state inspectors would show up, unannounced, to Approved Storage customers to perform an audit. Because “the person who used to handle this is gone,” the basement flooded or for whatever other reason, up to 60 customers per month would call Approved Storage and Waste in a panic.
To provide the high level of customer service they’re known for, the Approved Storage staff would have to drop everything, rifle through boxes containing copies of their customer’s waste manifests in the back, and fax or email three year’s worth of customer manifests over. Failure to produce these manifests while the auditor was on-site could result in a substantial first-time fine.
Not only was this often not fast enough for their customers, but it was also a tremendous drain on time and a huge distraction for Approved Storage. According to Approved Storage owner, Charles Dippolito, Jr., “Every time you turned around, someone was digging through the file room instead of on the phone with customers or lining up new ones.”
As their client base continued to grow from 2,500 to over 7,000, Approved Storage needed a better way to store, manage and access these manifests. They turned to Digiscribe International for the answer.
Digiscribe began working with Approved Storage in Fall 2011. Digiscribe now scans carbon copies of all Approved Storage customer manifests on production-grade, high-speed document scanners from Kodak—about 3,000 per month now after tackling an initial backlog of 30,000 documents. Digiscribe’s data entry team then keys in the account number and tracking number for quick search and retrieval. Images of every document are uploaded to the Digiscribe cloud document management system hosted on ImageSilo® from Digitech Systems.
Additionally, when Digiscribe finds data missing from scanned manifests, they notify Approved Storage so they can quickly go in and update the information through database look-ups integrated with their accounting system.
Because of the forward-facing functionality of ImageSilo, Approved Storage customers can now retrieve their own documents in a self-serve manner. The system helps prevent their customers from being fined and saves Approved Storage between $20,000 and $25,000 per year in labor. This savings is based on an average employee wage of $18 per hour, having to spend up to two hours to handle each customer request for up to 60 requests per month, and cutting down the number of requests and time needed to satisfy them to near zero.
While the system does save them tens of thousands per year and a big headache for their customers, the real benefit of working with Digiscribe is that it gives Approved Storage the tools and technology to compete with much larger, Fortune 500 businesses for new customers—especially large hospital chains. As a smaller outfit, they can offer competitive pricing with better customer service.
Dippolito said, “Offering online access to manifests allows us to offer the same services as much larger companies and still be able to charge 30% less. It really helps us get in with hospitals and other large facilities—they love that we can streamline and automate the way they access their manifests and provide that access 24/7. We could have never done this 15 years ago when there were no affordable cloud-based document management solutions.”
