In this very tough economic environment, technologies that seem to be still doing very well are Digitization, Storage and Document Management.
I am guessing that the root of all this success is Digitization. There is an enormous effort going on in the world currently to eliminate paper in companies around the globe. Official documents get scanned, right at the mail room, and paper sent off to the archive facility as soon as possible!
One great impetus for this is Offshoring of Business Processes. Scanned versions are read on the screen by BPO employees, tens of thousands of miles away and the companies' ERP systems updated with remote access through environments like Citrix Terminal emulation from PCs on a network. There are enormous numbers of other benefits also, incidentally, besides cost savings by outsourcing manual, repetitive data entry work!
Digitization opens up the floodgates of eliminating manual, replicated, error prone data entry in multiple systems within the company. More than that, it enables interchange of information between the company and suppliers and even customers.
Now instead of paper being exchanged between companies, computers belonging to the company talk to computers at suppliers, third-party shippers, logistics providers and even customers.
Imagine the huge productivity gains that the single act of digitization brings to the company!
Healthcare is an area that is waiting for this revolution and I only hope that the adoption of Digitization and Electronic Medical Records goes at a scorching pace. It has the potential of cutting down healthcare costs by orders of magnitude.
Insurance companies and Healthcare providers have been complaining relentlessly about the the difficulties in coming up with reasonable prices for services, medical consulting, laboratory and other diagnostic tests. Digitization would help build very quickly, the necessary databases of services and associated costs because of more accurate record keeping of efforts, lab materials and other resources used to deliver a service. And the availability of this information in electronic form!
This can help cut down the costs quickly, since there will be no more guess work and blind escalation of costs because of duplication of effort and lack of information. Doctors no longer need to ask for $100X for a service knowing fully well that the Insurance company will cut it down to $40X!
All because, parties in healthcare do not know the real costs of providing services!
Digitization is the miracle technology to come along in a while and has the potential of improving business processes and cutting costs, rather quickly!
Especially in Healthcare!
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