Tough Economy, Tight Budgets Lead CIOs To Focus On ROI

Lower revenues, reduced headcount and tighter IT budgets have placed increased pressure on CIOs and IT executives to find new ways to create greater efficiencies and increase productivity enterprise-wide.

Denni McColm, CIO at Citizens Memorial Healthcare (CMH), said that when it comes to efficiency-creating IT, the search is on. Citizens Memorial Healthcare is among 42 hospitals in 24 organizations to reach Stage 6 status of the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model. That means Citizens Memorial Healthcare is fully paperless, with electronic physician documentation, full clinical decision support and full picture archiving and communications systems available throughout the enterprise.

"Every industry is feeling the economic downturn, even healthcare," said McColm. "But I'm seeing more demand for software that will make us more efficient, help us do more with less."

As an example, McColm cites Citizens Memorial Healthcare's investment in ImageNow enterprise document management, imaging and workflow from Perceptive Software — technology that presents easily measurable, bottom-line benefits as well as incalculable advantages in employee satisfaction and customer service.

For McColm, the ability to generate more efficiency system-wide comes down to a very specific mission — eliminate all paperwork across the organization. "We calculated the costs of handling a single piece of paper from the point we order the paper through its entire workflow," said McColm. "Our hard cost calculations showed that in one year, we spent $150,000 in paper, copies and toner combined. But the soft costs, the cost of handling all that paper, equaled 75,000 work hours—the equivalent of 36 people—at a cost of $900,000."

It's that kind of research that helped McColm garner the support she needed to keep document management on the IT radar.

A Nucleus Research study commissioned by Perceptive Software calculated the costs of software, personnel, hardware and other investments over a three-year period to quantify CMH's total investment in ImageNow. According to Nucleus Research calculations, CMH achieved an annual ROI of 1,321 percent, recouping their investment in just one month's time. Over three years, ImageNow delivered total direct and indirect cost savings of $16M. Nucleus Research also determined that deploying ImageNow enabled CMH to improve the productivity of its staff, avoid new hires in its insurance billing department and improve its quality of care.

"People don't see document management technology as a luxury anymore, but as a necessity," said McColm. "And we're not even using it to its fullest potential yet. Here at CMH, people have seen ImageNow at work and it has heightened the demand for those kinds of tools."

David Shapiro, CIO at Barron Collier, one of the largest diversified land holding companies in southern Florida, agrees with McColm. Although Shapiro is in a much different industry, he faces the same challenges.

"I'm tasked with looking for efficiencies — to make the same number of jobs more efficient for everyone," Shapiro said. "From an IT perspective, if I can cut a person's processing time from one hour to 10 minutes, that's a significant savings."

Shapiro believes the value of an IT investment often cannot be fully realized in hard number calculations. "You can't put a direct dollar amount on the ‘soft benefits' some IT tools also provide. If you can give people the right set of tools to feel good about their jobs and empowered to work smarter, what a difference it makes," said Shapiro.

"Keeping morale up adds to the overall ability of a business to maintain success in an economic downturn. ImageNow has done that for us. We've increased productivity significantly," Shapiro said.

So what can CIOs and IT directors take to the table when making the case for the ROI of document management in a down economy?

Putting ROI in context is invaluable, according to McColm. "Map out your own workflow, then mark out all the unnecessary steps due to paper," she said. "You'll see that by keeping document management in the IT budget, you'll actually eliminate the cost of the solution tenfold."

Shapiro agrees that peer and personal success stories go a long way in supporting those intangibles that companies simply believe in or they don't. "Ultimately, there must be a leap of faith that the hard numbers just don't show. The senior management at Barron Collier was willing to take that leap, and ImageNow has lived up to the promise."

Although corporate budget dollars may be waning, the need for organizational efficiency is greater than ever. IT decision-makers are looking to make technology investments that will bring immediate productivity gains. And for those who've seen its value in action, ImageNow enterprise document management, imaging and workflow will continue to make the cut.

To see how business leaders worldwide are putting up big ROI numbers with ImageNow, visit: http://www.imagenow.com/success/roi-with-imagenow.psi.

About Perceptive Software
Since 1995 Perceptive Software has built enterprise content management software, including document management, document imaging and workflow solutions, to help organizations efficiently capture and organize virtually any document, then easily retrieve a precise page at the moment it's needed. More than 2,000 organizations in 30 countries rely on the ImageNow product suite to simplify their business processes.

SOURCE: Perceptive Software