OCR Aids FBI And DHS In Keeping Us Safer While DOD And VA Still Fumble Claims Processing
By Karla Paris
Many government agencies see the benefits of digitizing records while others struggle with IT adoption.
Converting complex records into digital form is a great concept. For the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), greater records access and efficiency, including processing of immigration and criminal records, will keep our nation safer. Digitizing records also reduces expenses and makes serving constituents more efficacious.
When digitizing records goes well, the outcome is all that is promised. Case in point, the FBI‘s Criminal Justice Information Services division completed the digital conversion of an estimated 30 million records and 83 million fingerprint cards as part of a two-decade effort to modernize the division’s biometric file system. This conversion was a priority in order to provide accessible, current, organized, and quality controlled records for law enforcement and homeland security to ultimately better service and protect citizens.
Like the FBI, the DHS is also making the consolidation and digitization of records a priority. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service have several ongoing projects for converting records to digital form. These projects involve cloning large volumes of immigration data and digitizing the images for migration to the government’s Enterprise Document Management System.
Both the FBI and DHS agencies have relied on advances in optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities in document scanners to advance its goals of digitizing records.
Separately, when digitizing records goes poorly, the outcome can be disastrous. A July audit by the Defense Department's inspector general found the Department failed to make proper records transfers to the VA. In the Army, 77 percent of records transferred in 2013 were not timely and 28 percent were not complete, the audit said.
Inability of these agencies to share electronic health records efficiently is one of several technology issues contributing to healthcare and claims-processing delays within the VA.
While the verdict is still out on the VA’s adoption of improving its record sharing capabilities, it has established the Veterans Claims Intake Program (VCIP) to streamline processes for receiving records and data. This program is intended to facilitate the Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS) and other Veterans Benefit Administration (VBA) systems.
Scanning operations and the transfer of veteran data into VBMS are primary intake capabilities that are managed by the VCIP. VBA currently has contracts with two scanning vendors—CACI-ISS, Inc. and Systems Made Simple, Inc. According to VCIP staff, both scanning vendors scan about 2.4 million documents per day.
SOURCE: Military.com