Technical FAQs

From large payouts and losses in some segments to rapid growth in others, the insurance industry has experienced seismic shifts due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. To keep some semblance of normalcy during these changes and the aftermath, organizations are turning to InsurTech solutions for help. 

According to Deloitte, InsurTech investments remain strong, with COVID-19 simply shifting priorities to virtual customer engagement and operational efficiency rather than cutting budgets. Data collected by Venture Scanner indicates that the global InsurTech market generated $2.2B in the first half of 2020.

The Challenge of Advancing a Product to Meet Immediate Needs

Tasks once completed manually at insurance companies can bottleneck an entire system in just a few days and prevent insurers from winning much-needed revenue. For this reason, providers are scrambling to make fast efficiency gains while minimizing risks that could lead to unrealized business opportunities due to slow processing. When it’s feast or famine, with customers either signing up or making claims in droves, there’s no time to waste.

As a product developer in the InsurTech space, this puts you in a precarious position. After all, how can you add functionality overnight when it takes time to build those new capabilities? While some organizations may have the available workforce to rally and build new features quickly, most don’t. 

If you’re like most in the development space, finding and retaining talent is a challenge. What’s more, they’re likely already looking at a project backlog spanning many months—if not years. For this reason, augmenting existing solutions with white-label, third-party plug-ins is an attractive option. Now, let’s turn our attention to the type of functionality insurers need to navigate recent shifts.

4 Essential Capabilities for the Insurance Industry in the Wake of COVID-19

Pew Research found that by June of 2020 roughly 3% of Americans had already made a mass exodus from highly populated areas like New York, New York and San Francisco, California due to challenges posed by the COVID-19 global pandemic. This number has likely grown since June and will likely continue to grow as hubs of economic growth continue to shift and settle. 

For each insured individual that moves and retains insurance coverage, there’s paperwork. For many, they’ll even switch providers as their previous provider may not be able to provide competitive rates in their new location. The sheer change-management involved in migrations of this scale is daunting. Without the ability to process requests faster, insurance companies could find themselves struggling to keep up. 

To help your insurance industry clients effectively navigate the road ahead, your applications need to include greater data-capture, data-conversion, and optical character recognition technologies that reduce the need for manual intervention in document processing. 

1. Data Capture Efficiency  

As the number of file formats increases, insurance organizations need the ability to quickly capture and process hundreds of different image formats. Beyond simply capturing them, they often also need to aggregate and convert those multiple formats into a single, secure, and digitally accessible PDF.

Rather than trying to build everything from scratch, sometimes partnering with a third-party software developer can give you a leg up on all the delivery time associated with expanding feature sets for the insurance industry.  

Essential Capabilities Should Include:

• Support for multiple file formats
• Automated image-correction and optical character recognition technology
• Clean integration that maintains or improves processing speed 

Once data is captured, it then needs to be managed. To explore document management capabilities to consider when expanding your feature set for the insurance industry, click here. 

2. Identify Form Fields

Whether potential buyers are requesting new policies or current customers are evaluating existing policies, precise and efficient data-capture technologies can improve the ability of insurers to access important data and analyze policies. Adding these capabilities requires quite a bit of strategy. First, one must consider the core challenges involved in effective data capture: 

• Poor inputs that aren’t easy to correct and capture 
• Poorly designed forms that reduce image recognition success  
• Imaging technology that can’t recognize a robust number of file formats and fonts 

When contemplating the structure of boxes for character collection, our experts found that using a square shape rather than a rectangle results in less data loss. While rectangles may, at first, appear to save space and therefore be a more effective option, research showed that they typically don’t provide the average user enough space to clearly write letters or characters without interfacing with the boundary lines. Thus, square boxes improve data transfer success. 

Figure 1: Examples of ineffective rectangular boxes versus effective square boxes for character capture. 

This is just one factor to consider when streamlining form processing within an insurance technology application. To explore more research on this topic, download the Best Practices: Improving ICR Accuracy with Better Form Design whitepaper.  

3. Confidence Value Reporting for Data Recognition

Not all optical character recognition technology is created equal. That’s why it’s important to make sure any solution you either create internally or partner with a third party to integrate provides ongoing confidence value reporting for data recognition. Having this capability in place can alert you to problems before they lead to costly issues — like duplicated efforts, a poor customer experience, or incomplete data hindering contract processing. 

4. Use OCR to Identify Different Documents

Optical character recognition (OCR) can help insurance companies cut down on manual effort by identifying different forms automatically, which equips application developers like you to create automation within your company’s product that routes identified forms through predefined workflows. 

Without OCR, significant manual effort is required to process forms required to execute insurance contracts. When evaluating OCR capabilities to add to applications, keep in mind these essentials:

• Successful Character Recognition Rates – Given the highly regulated nature of insurance along with high fines for shortcomings, it’s often well worth the extra investment to get a solution with 99% accuracy versus 95%. 

• Multi-Document Recognition with High Confidence Values– Given the broad number of file types insurance organizations receive, having a software package in place that cleans up documents before running them through optical character recognition tools improves the likelihood of extracted data being usable. With cleaner data in hand, insurance agents are empowered to make better recommendations to customers, ensuring they’re not over or under insured.

These are just a few items to consider when adding document viewing and forms processing features to your application. While automated workflows may have given organizations heartburn in the past, the reality is that high-volume, fast-changing environments can’t survive without them. Markets are changing so quickly that without automation to help bring order to the chaos, the tidal wave of requests will overtake the underprepared. 

Help your clients better respond to not only COVID-19, but also future-proof their ability to streamline claims by expanding document viewing and form processing capabilities. To learn more about our insurtech capabilities, explore our content solutions for insurance companies.      

Although often considered a bit old fashioned, the insurance industry has made great strides in recent years to adapt to the changing needs of its customers. The latest generation of insurance customers expects faster service, better support, and more options from providers. Given these pressures, it’s no surprise that InsurTech developers have found ample opportunities to deliver solutions that help insurance firms better manage their workflows and create better customer experiences.

Despite the successes of this digital transformation, however, there are still a number of challenges that InsurTech developers face when building new applications. Investing heavily in creating powerful AI and big data tools might help those platforms stand out from the crowd, but they won’t find much success with firms if they don’t also provide the core functionality organizations need to service their customers. 

That’s why many InsurTech developers are turning to versatile SDK and API integrations to expand their feature sets without compromising their development timelines.

4 Major Challenges of InsurTech Applications

1. Security and Privacy

As the insurance industry continues to shift toward digital processes and platforms, it’s become more important than ever for InsurTech applications to keep sensitive data secure. While most organizations do invest in cybersecurity protections, they often don’t realize how their own practices could potentially pose a risk to customer information. This is especially true of insurers that rely on third-party programs for various tasks like document viewing and editing. Take, for instance, the case of Folksam Group, which inadvertently shared client data from as many as one million customers with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Adobe in late 2020. 

2. File Management

Today’s insurers are receiving all kinds of documents, files, and images from their customers, which creates something of a document dilemma. A single auto accident claim, for instance, might have valuable information spread across multiple PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheet files, scanned images of hand-written forms, and image files. In order to process claims quickly and effectively, firms need InsurTech solutions that provide an all-in-one solution that can handle a broad array of file formats. Without these file management tools, insurers will be forced to use multiple programs to meet their needs, which creates inefficient dependencies and increases security risks.

3. Data Collection

Insurance companies gather quite a bit of information from form applications, both in physical and digital formats. Unfortunately, transferring that information from a form document into an InsurTech system is often a laborious manual process. Not only is manual data collection time consuming, it also increases the likelihood of human error. Even when firms do implement an InsurTech solution with forms processing capabilities, however, they often lack the capability to read certain types of form fields, especially those completed by hand. The ability to adapt to new form templates is also critical for organizations that want to invest in automation. 

4. Remote Collaboration

The COVID-19 pandemic may have forced insurance offices to rapidly embrace a remote work strategy, but many firms had already been investing in some form of hybrid work model for years. Nationwide was able to transition 98 percent of its workforce to remote status precisely because the company already had the technology solutions in place to allow insurance agents to work from home. Without some way of facilitating remote collaboration directly through InsurTech applications, organizations end up relying on email, which poses serious security concerns. Furthermore, with multiple copies of a document being distributed and downloaded, it quickly becomes difficult to know which version incorporates the most up-to-date changes.

SDK and API InsurTech Solutions

Building new functionality into an application always involves a tradeoff. When developers choose to code something from scratch, that means pulling team members away from another project or extending the product’s release timeline. In a fast-moving industry where InsurTech developers are racing competitors to be the first to market, it doesn’t make sense to design and build every aspect of an application in-house. 

Rather than pulling valuable development resources away from their innovative InsurTech features, developers can solve common insurance challenges much faster with SDK toolkits and API integrations. 

Secure File Viewing

The easiest way for InsurTech solutions to keep documents secure is to integrate HTML5 viewing capabilities directly into the application. Rather than being forced to download or open a file for viewing in a third-party application, employees can view multiple document formats natively. This is critical because it means no data will be shared with third-party programs.  Since the files remain safely within the secure InsurTech environment, firms can also control the level of access to any document, which prevents unauthorized individuals from downloading or viewing the contents. Thanks to API-based integrations like Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Viewer, InsurTech developers can help their applications safely view more than 100 unique file types without any third-party dependencies.

Data Capture

By integrating forms processing capabilities into their applications, InsurTech developers can provide their clients with powerful tools that allow them to gather essential data quickly and accurately. As the essential connective tissue between customers and insurance databases, form field recognition integrations use OCR technology to intelligently identify form data and extract it for processing. They can also be set up to identify a wide range of insurance forms to quickly identify and scan documents to streamline processing workflows. Accusoft’s FormSuite for Structured Forms even goes a step further by incorporating powerful image cleanup functionality to ensure that data will be extracted as accurately as possible.

File Conversion

In order to meet the file management challenges of today’s insurance providers, InsurTech developers need document and image processing integrations that can read and write multiple file formats. Information spread across multiple documents, emails, or even texts can be processed using OCR technology, and then consolidated and converted into a variety of formats for easy reference and collaboration. Rather than juggling several files with different dependencies, an SDK integration like Accusoft’s ImageGear can easily output processed files in PDF, RTF, XML, or DOCX format for viewing and editing within a single application.

Editing and Annotation

Providing secure document viewing capabilities solves only one half of the insurance collaboration challenge. InsurTech applications also need to provide both internal and external stakeholders with the ability to edit and markup documents throughout the application and claims process. Content processing integrations can allow authorized users to make changes to documents completely within their InsurTech solution and review markups and comments from other collaborators. 

Since all editing occurs within the application itself, there’s no need to worry about anyone downloading a document to make changes locally and creating confusion over which version is the most up-to-date. Redactions may also be necessary to hide private or confidential information from unauthorized viewers. As an added benefit, PrizmDoc Viewer’s editing features allow users to make a variety of markups and redactions while preserving the integrity of the original file.

Accelerate Your InsurTech Application Development with Accusoft

Accusoft’s collection of powerful SDK toolkits and API integrations provide innovative InsurTech developers with the resources they need to solve core insurance industry challenges. By implementing proven functionality into their applications, project managers can streamline the development process and dedicate more resources to the innovative features that will set their platform apart from the competition.

Whether you’re looking to incorporate versatile document viewing and editing or need a more accurate forms processing solution, Accusoft’s family of InsurTech SDKs and APIs can help your development team get to market faster. Learn more about what our products can do for your application in our InsurTech fact sheet.

Organized each year by ALM, LegalTech is one of the most important events for the legal industry. The conference brings together a broad variety of experienced legal professionals and innovative LegalTech providers to highlight the business, regulatory, technology, and talent trends in the market. In previous years, LegalTech was held in New York City and attended by more than 8000 people.

LegalTech 2021 Is Now Legalweek(year)

This year, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the organizers to take a different approach. The first decision involved shifting LegalTech from an in-person conference to a fully virtual event in order to protect the health of both attendees and organizers. While many industry events have made a similar transition, the LegalTech team went a step further by breaking the conference into a series of five interactive virtual events held over the course of 2021. This new virtual series was dubbed Legalweek(year) and aims to provide legal professionals with a powerful resource for working through an unprecedented era.

“This decision was made to address the needs of our legal community during these trying times of COVID-19 and to provide the type of innovative education, solutions, and connections that is so crucial to legal leaders,” said ALM’s Mark Fried. “The 2021 series will set the stage for a resurgence in the legal sector and a big ‘Welcome Back’ to attendees for our in-person Legalweek event (in 2022).”

The first virtual Legalweek(year) event is scheduled for February 2-4, 2021 and will feature bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams, legal AI expert Josua Walker, and former New Jersey governor and federal prosecutor Chris Christie as keynote speakers. Attendees will not only be able to participate remotely, but they will also have an additional six months worth of on-demand access to virtual content following each event.

Visit the Accusoft Legalweek(year) Virtual Booth

As a longtime sponsor of LegalTech, Accusoft is proud to participate in this groundbreaking series of virtual events. The conference has historically been a great opportunity for us to speak directly with the independent software vendors and legal IT professionals about the latest industry trends and LegalTech applications. 

This year, we’ll be hosting a “virtual booth” through the Legalweek(year) event site. Whether you’re a developer looking to solve a particular software challenge or a project manager building an in-house solution for your firm, you’ll find plenty of resources and support at the Accusoft booth. Read through our numerous case studies and LegalTech whitepapers or schedule a meeting with one of our product specialists to learn more about our SDK and API integrations for legal software. You can even chat with someone in real time if you need a quick answer!

After completing registration, Legalweek(year) attendees can access the Accusoft virtual booth during the event simply by logging into their account.

Our LegalTech Solutions

Accusoft’s combination of content processing and conversion integrations help today’s innovative LegalTech applications reach their full potential. As law firms and legal departments incorporate more technology into their everyday operations, they need software tools capable of automating workflows, simplifying eDiscovery, and facilitating secure collaboration.

PrizmDoc Viewer

Our feature-rich HTML5 document viewer allows users to seamlessly view a variety of document and image files within their secure web application. Thanks to PrizmDoc Viewer’s powerful REST APIs, developers can provide additional functionality, such as annotations and redactions, that is essential for legal organizations.

PrizmDoc Editor

In addition to allowing users to edit DOCX files within the secure confines of their LegalTech applications, PrizmDoc Editor’s automated document assembly features streamlines the contract creation process to improve efficiency and accuracy. Documents can be assembled programmatically, incorporating commonly used or specific clauses, special language, and client data to eliminate “cut and paste” errors. Once documents are assembled, PrizmDoc Editor’s sharing tools allow firms to control access and ensure that everyone is working from the same up-to-date version.

ImageGear

With the ability to read, convert, and compress a wide range of files, our ImageGear SDK integration provides LegalTech applications with the tools they need to manage almost any type of file collected during the eDiscovery process. Powerful optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities allow ImageGear to read a wide variety of languages from around the world and convert scanned documents into searchable plain text or PDF files.

LegalTech in 2021 and Beyond

As legal organizations continue to make strides toward achieving true digital transformation, they will need versatile LegalTech applications capable of adapting along with them. Accusoft’s family of SDK and API integrations can help developers leverage the power of their innovative software tools and free up resources to focus on improving their core capabilities.

We hope you’ll join us at Legalweek(year) on February 2-4, 2021. Our booth will be available throughout the virtual event, so stop by to find out how Accusoft can help you realize the potential of your LegalTech applications.

Having the right technology in place is essential for healthcare organizations seeking to deliver better patient outcomes. That’s why medical technology developers are working hard to build the next generation of software tools that will help medical professionals to deliver care more effectively. 

Annotation features provide a number of benefits in these ongoing efforts. Although typically associated with editing and workplace collaboration, medical annotations also have a very different and very specific role when it comes to diagnostic imaging and patient health records.

Enhancing Healthcare Collaboration with Annotations

One of the most straightforward use cases for medical annotation is communicating important information regarding diagnostic images. As images like MRIs and X-rays are passed back and forth between providers, radiologists, technicians, and clinicians, the ability to add comments and point out important details greatly reduces the chance of confusion or of some critical detail being overlooked.

The challenge in these cases, however, is to annotate images and documents without altering the integrity of the original files. This requires healthcare technology developers to build solutions that can retain an unaltered version of the file even as multiple collaborators view and make comments. 

Medical Annotation and Machine Learning

Healthcare solutions are rapidly incorporating sophisticated machine learning tools to analyze large quantities of data and make a quick, accurate diagnosis of conditions. Before these powerful tools can perform that diagnostic work, they need to be properly trained to know what they’re looking for, especially when it comes to very nuanced differences between scanned images and seemingly unrelated details in patient records.

By using annotation tools, medical technology specialists can provide excellent guidance for machine learning development. An MRI scan, for instance, contains so much information that an AI-driven program isn’t going to know what to look for unless the key elements are called out with annotations that indicate certain parts of the image or provide comments about noteworthy aspects.

The DICOM Dilemma

While many software integrations allow developers to incorporate annotation tools for common file formats like PDF and JPEG, the healthcare sector presents a unique challenge in the form of DICOM files. This industry-specific format contains both images and important metadata identifiers that provide information about the image itself and the patient in question. While there are ways to extract images from DICOM files and convert them into a more manageable format, doing so could endanger compliance status or permanently degrade the image quality.

Developers working on healthcare technology solutions need to make sure they can not only deliver annotation tools, but also the ability to add annotations to DICOM files without altering the source file itself. 

Mastering Medical Annotation with ImageGear Medical

ImageGear Medical provides a broad range of XML-based annotation features that allows healthcare software developers to implement UI elements for marking up both images and documents. Since this powerful imaging SDK also gives users the ability to create and view DICOM files, it can quickly enhance the functionality of medical applications to enhance collaboration and ensure diagnostic accuracy.

Once integrated into an application with a viewing UI, ImageGear Medical supports several commonly-utilized annotation marks that makes it easy for users to highlight certain aspects of an image, comment on them, and even cover up some elements using filled-in graphical objects. Annotations can also be grouped in layers to make them easier to manage and distinguish from one another.

ImageGear Medical annotation objects for DICOM include:

• Text: Adds descriptive text using a variety of fonts, colors, and sizes. Opacity can be adjusted and the text object can appear with or without a border.
• Point: Places a coordinate point on the image or document, which can be used to support other annotation marks.
• Polyline: A series of connected straight lines formed by dragging and clicking a mouse or pointer.
• Curve: Used for creating spline curve marks. Users can select multiple vertices and tensions when creating curves.
• Ellipse: A circular outline mark that can be used to indicate important elements of an image or document. When filled, it can also cover up areas of the image.
• Polygon: Like the ellipse, it can be filled or unfilled and is typically deployed to cover or highlight some aspect of an image or document. Polygons are especially useful for medical annotation because they can capture more lines and angles than simple rectangles or circles.

In order to maintain the integrity of the original image, ImageGear Medical stores annotations as a separate file that is overlaid upon the image during display. While annotations can be merged, or “burned in” the file, keeping them separate ensures that the original image itself is not altered directly. This is incredibly important when it comes to DICOM files, which often need to be kept on file for baseline comparisons on a future diagnosis.

Enhance Healthcare Flexibility with ImageGear Medical

Annotations and DICOM viewing support are just the beginning of ImageGear Medical’s expansive feature set. It also provides advanced filtering tools for sharpening and smoothing as well as image cleanup functions like despeckling, noise removal, and deskewing. With support for several dozen medical image and document formats, ImageGear Medical can easily convert files into easy-to-manage formats and compress files for efficient storage.

Available for .NET and C/C++ environments, ImageGear Medical can turn your healthcare application into a powerful annotation platform with full support for DICOM files. Start your free trial of this powerful SDK to discover first-hand how it can empower your medical annotation solution.

The last twelve months have seen an unprecedented shift in the way organizations and customers are utilizing digital services. According to data gathered by McKinsey in 2020, digital adoption made roughly five years worth of progress in a span of eight weeks at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While this massive shift impacted almost every industry, the government sector in particular faced tremendous disruption as its legacy systems struggled to keep pace with demand.

Many of the changes in the way people access government services are likely to remain in place even after the threat of the pandemic recedes, which creates a huge opportunity for software developers specializing in GovTech applications. A closer look at GovTech trends for 2021 provides some insight into those opportunities.

5 Key GovTech Trends to Watch in 2021

1. Remote Functionality 

Government agencies had to fundamentally rethink the workplace in response to the pandemic. Non-essential personnel transitioned to working remotely whenever possible, but this move created a number of challenges in terms of collaboration and security. Employees still need to be able to view, edit, and share files without compromising privacy or creating version confusion. All too often, remote workers resort to ad hoc solutions involving third party programs and conventional email, all of which make it incredibly difficult for an organization to maintain control over its essential files. GovTech developers can address these challenges directly by building software that facilitates remote collaboration entirely within a secure application.

2. Doing More with Less

One of the downstream consequences of social distancing restrictions and stay at home orders has been the erosion of sales tax revenue at the state and local level. While the impacts have not been as catastrophic as originally feared, many states are still facing significant budget shortfalls despite making deep spending cuts. The pressure will be on to find GovTech solutions that are easy to implement, use, and maintain. Efficiency and flexibility will continue to be important considerations as state and municipal governments seek out platforms that can address multiple needs and allow them to eliminate costly redundancies.

3. Shift to Digital

When government offices were forced to shut their doors in the early days of the pandemic, they had to scramble to find ways to deliver services digitally. This was especially difficult for agencies relying on legacy infrastructure and outdated software, but the transition to digital is unlikely to slow down anytime soon now that it’s underway. According to a recent study, 61 percent of government officials surveyed believe that the pandemic has accelerated their digital transformation goals, while 75 percent claim that their agency is pushing to offer even more services digitally. That will mean plenty of opportunity for innovative GovTech developers that can provide the automation and data management tools governments need to bring their services into the 21st century.

4. Fight for Privacy

Government agencies sit upon massive amounts of private data that must be kept secure at all costs. From personally identifiable information like Social Security Numbers to contracts and applications that contain confidential business data and vital trade secrets, governments have a responsibility to protect sensitive data at all times. They need systems and software that not only keeps files safely within the secure confines of an application, but also provides the redaction capabilities that allow agencies to comply with information requests. By designing platforms that promote transparency while also protecting privacy, GovTech developers can play an important role in building trust between government and citizens. 

5. Citizen-Centric Experience

The combination of evolving public expectations and demographic change was rapidly reshaping the delivery of government services even before the pandemic. In a global survey conducted in late 2019, Accenture found that 50 percent of respondents believed that requests to an agency could be resolved faster with the use of AI assistants or chatbots and that a transition to 24/7 access to government services would be greatly beneficial. Respondents also wanted easier access to their personal information (74 percent), faster response times (73 percent), and greater visibility into the status of their queries and applications (64 percent). Younger citizens accustomed to customer-centric experiences are further shifting expectations of what services the government should be able to offer digitally. It will fall to GovTech developers to design applications that connect citizens to their government and streamline processes that have long relied upon inefficient manual practices and direct physical interactions.

Enhance Your GovTech Application with Accusoft Solutions

Working with the government sector presents a number of challenges to even seasoned developers. From meeting complex compliance and privacy requirements to managing a dizzying range of document types, building and implementing an effective solution takes a great deal of time and development resources.

One of the easiest ways to speed up that process is by incorporating proven functionality into an application with SDKs or APIs. Accusoft’s collection of software integrations helps GovTech developers get to market faster by providing reliable and government-ready content processing features.

• PrizmDoc Viewer: A powerful HTML5 viewer with annotation and redaction capabilities, PrizmDoc Viewer makes it easy to view, edit, and manage public records, contracts, and even more sensitive documents all within a secure GovTech application.
• ImageGear: With ImageGear’s extensive image processing, conversion, and compression features behind them, GovTech applications can easily improve document workflows, consolidate information, and meet government archiving standards (thanks to PDF/A support).
• FormSuite: Processing government forms can quickly overwhelm an application if it doesn’t have the capabilities to handle multiple form types or clean up document images. FormSuite for Structured Forms is a collection of forms processing SDKs that helps GovTech applications quickly sort and extract data from structured forms for superior speed and accuracy.

As GovTech trends continue to accelerate in 2021, developers need partners they can trust to provide secure, reliable functionality to their applications so they can focus their efforts on building software that meets the exacting needs of the government sector. Learn more about how Accusoft can fulfill that role and elevate the potential of GovTech applications.

Today’s organizations gather information from a variety of sources. Structured forms remain one of the most popular tools for collecting and processing data, and anyone who has filled out such a form recently has likely encountered the familiar bubbles or squares used to indicate some form of information. Whether these marks are used to identify marital status, health conditions, education level, or some other parameter, optical mark recognition plays an important role in streamlining forms processing and data capture.

What is Optical Mark Recognition?

Optical mark recognition (OMR) reads and captures data marked on a special type of document form. In most instances, this form consists of a bubble or a square that is filled in as part of a test or survey. After the form is marked, it can either be read by dedicated OMR software or fed into a physical scanner device that shines a beam of light onto the paper and then detects answers based on how much light is reflected back to an optical sensor. Older OMR scanners detected answers by measuring how much light passed through the paper itself using phototubes on the other side. Since the phototubes were very sensitive, #2 pencils often had to be used when filling out forms to ensure an accurate reading.

Today’s OMR scanners are much more accurate and versatile, capable of reading marks regardless of how they’re filled out (although they struggle if the mark is made with the same color as the printed form). More importantly, OMR software has made it possible to capture data from OMR forms without the need for any special equipment. This is especially helpful for processing forms information that exists in digital format, such as PDF files or JPEG images. 

The History of Optical Mark Recognition

One of the oldest versions of forms processing technology, OMR dates back to the use of punch cards, which were first developed in the late 1800s for use with crude “tabulating” machines. The cards typically provided simple “yes/no” information based on whether or not a hole was punched out. When fed through the tabulating machine, a hole would be registered and counted. This same basic principle would allow more complex machines to perform basic arithmetic in the early 1900s before serving as the foundation for early computer programming by mid-century. Entire computer programs were stored on stacks of punch cards, which would remain in use until well into the 1970s when more powerful machines made them obsolete.

Although OMR operates on the same principle as a punch card, it instead uses scanning technology to detect the presence of a mark made by a pencil or a pen. This form of identification was first popularized by IBM’s electrographic “mark sense” technology in the 1930s and 1940s. The concept itself was first developed by a schoolteacher named Reynold Johnson, who wanted to streamline test grading. He designed a machine that could read pencil marks on a special test paper and then tabulate the marks to generate a final score. After joining IBM in 1934, Johnson spearheaded the development of the Type 805 Test Scoring Machine, which debuted in 1938 and revolutionized test scoring in the education sector. In production until 1963, the 805 could score 800 sheets per hour when run by an experienced operator.

The 805 registered marks by using metal brushes to sense the electrical conductivity of graphite from the pencil lead. While effective, it had limitations in terms of reading speed and flexibility. When Everett Franklin Lindquist, best known as the creator of the ACT, needed a machine that could keep up with Iowa’s widespread adoption of standardized testing in the 1950s, he developed the first true optical mark reader. Patented in 1962, Lindquist’s machine detected marks by measuring how much light passed through a scoring sheet and was capable of scoring 4,000 tests per hour.

Throughout the 1960s, OMR scanning technology continued to improve and spread to a variety of industries looking for ways to rapidly process data. In education, however, the OMR market would soon be dominated by the Scantron Corporation, which was founded in 1972 to market smaller, less expensive scanners to K-12 schools and universities. After placing the scanners in educational institutions, Scantron then sold large quantities of proprietary test sheets that could be used for a variety of testing purposes. Scantron was so successful that their distinctive green and white sheets have become synonymous with OMR scanning for generations of US college students.

The next major innovation in OMR technology arrived in the early 1990s with dedicated OMR software that could replicate the drop-out capabilities of commercial scanners. Part of the reason why scanners used proprietary, pre-printed forms was so they could use colors and watermarks that would not register during scanning for more accurate reading. Thanks to OMR software, it became possible to create templated forms and then remove the form image during the reading process to ensure that only marked information remained.

Take Control of OMR Forms with Accusoft SDKs

Accusoft’s FormFix forms processing SDK features powerful production-level OMR capabilities. It not only detects the presence of check or bubble marks, but can also detect markings in form fields, which is particularly useful for determining whether or not a signature is present on a document. Capable of reading single or multiple marks at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degree orientations, FormFix can also recognize checkboxes and be programmed to accommodate a variety of bubble shapes. Its form drop-out and image cleanup features also help to ensure the highest level of accuracy during OMR reading.

For expanded forms functionality, including optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR), developers can also turn to FormSuite for Structured Forms. Featuring a comprehensive set of forms template creation tools and data capture capabilities, FormSuite can streamline forms processing workflows and significantly reduce the costs and errors associated with manual data entry and extraction.

Find out what flexible OMR functionality can do for your application with a fully-featured trial of the FormSuite SDK. Get started with some functional sample code and explore FormFix’s features to start planning your integration.

For today’s healthcare organizations, having a versatile electronic health records (EHR) system is essential for running an efficient practice and connecting to other medical providers. Thanks to EHRs, practices can ensure that they’re getting a complete picture of a patient’s health and treatment history, which allows them to deliver much better care outcomes. As developers continue to refine the usability of these systems, they need to consider how they can improve core features like healthcare electronic document management and medical imaging support.

Managing Medical Documents

A typical EHR system has to be able to handle quite a lot of document types. Anyone who has visited a healthcare provider is quite familiar with the myriad forms used to gather patient information. Many of those forms end up being converted into digital formats that need to be managed within the EHR system. Then there are digital versions of lab reports, physician notes, invoices, and financial documents. 

While EHR systems may utilize databases to store much of the information they need, healthcare providers still need to be able to produce physical documents and view digital files in many situations. This could include communicating information to patients, complying with regulatory requests, or filing a financial claim of some kind. More importantly, they also rely on digital documents to enter data into the EHR system. The push toward interoperability between EHR systems has improved information sharing, but there are still many instances where medical records are delivered in the form of a document that needs to be managed securely.

Document Conversion

If an EHR application lacks the right file conversion capabilities, viewing and extracting data from those documents could prove difficult. The last thing a practice wants to do is actually remove them from the secure EHR system to open and convert the files using separate software that may not be compliant when it comes to handling healthcare information. Even if the external application is secure, transferring files over, converting them, and then transferring them back is both inefficient and creates unnecessary risk (especially if someone forgets to delete the original file or move it back into the EHR environment).

ImageGear Medical has a document conversion feature that supports a wide range of file types, allowing developers to build EHR applications capable of quickly converting incoming documents. They can even set up their solution to perform conversion tasks programmatically to help streamline workflows and minimize human error. This helps practices to get a better handle on document management, ensuring that they will be able to do everything they need with files completely within the EHR application.

Other Essential Document Features

But ImageGear Medical’s document capabilities go far beyond just conversion. With full annotation support, developers can provide markup tools within the EHR system that allow physicians to make notes and comments on various documents. This allows them to share information much more easily. If a physician has a question about a diagnosis or a prescription, for instance, they can simply leave an annotation note directly on the document rather than referring to it in a separate message.

ImageGear Medical also allows applications to perform full-page optical character recognition (OCR), which can quickly read and extract text from document and image files. This feature is especially useful for capturing text from scanned images of documents, which can then be used to create a searchable PDF or fill form fields within the EHR system. The OCR engine not only reads most Western languages, but also detects and reads several Eastern language characters.

Managing DICOM Files

One of the biggest challenges healthcare organizations face is with managing medical imaging files. When providers need to send X-Rays, MRIs, or CT Scans, they use a standardized file format known as Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) files. These files are more than just image files, however. They contain extensive datasets that provide a patient’s information along with image pixel data for multi-dimensional medical scans. A DICOM file can be quite large due to the high-resolution image data used by most medical imaging equipment.

Although most EHR systems are capable of transmitting DICOM files (via a DICOM out or DICOM send feature), they usually can’t actually view them in their native format. Since Windows doesn’t recognize them as image files, additional viewing software is typically needed to open and view them. This is why physical storage, like discs and flash drives, are often used to transfer DICOM files along with the necessary viewing software.

ImageGear Medical helps to solve the DICOM dilemma thanks to its extensive conversion and compression capabilities. By decoding the complex data contained within the file, ImageGear Medical can convert DICOM files into image formats that are much easier to view and manage. This is especially useful for smaller practices that don’t have a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) capable of storing, retrieving, distributing, and viewing high-quality medical images. 

Converting DICOM files makes it possible for healthcare professionals to view them on any device connected with their EHR system. That could include tablets or other IoT devices that healthcare technology companies are rolling out to put critical medical data on the front lines of everyday care. Developers can also use ImageGear Medical’s conversion tools to allow their EHR system to share viewable versions of diagnostic scans with patients, allowing practices to make good on the promise of providing patients access to their essential health data at all times. 

The sheer size of DICOM files makes them difficult for many practices to manage. Simply compressing them tends to degrade the image data, which can create significant problems when files are unpacked and opened for viewing. Losing even a small degree of image quality can make it much harder to render an accurate diagnosis. In some cases, poorly designed compression can even make it nearly impossible to uncompress again at all. Thanks to powerful lossless compression technology, ImageGear Medical makes it easier to share medical images between providers without damaging the integrity of the original data.

Expand EHR Capabilities with ImageGear Medical

Accusoft’s imaging, conversion, and compression technology has been supporting the needs of the healthcare industry for decades. As developers work to expand the capabilities of their EHR applications, our engineers are busy improving the medical SDKs that will provide them with the features they need to stand out in a competitive market. 

ImageGear Medical utilizes a combination of efficient code and elegant APIs to deliver the document and image processing tools EHR systems require. For a closer look at this dynamic SDKs capabilities, check out our extensive developer resources today or download a free trial to get started.

The Accusoft engineering team is always exploring ways to improve PrizmDoc’s document processing capabilities. We regularly consult with our active customers to ensure that we’re focusing on features that will help them push the boundaries of innovation and deliver a better experience to end users.

That’s why we’re excited to talk about PrizmDoc’s new OCR API feature, which allows Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to tap into the power of Accusoft’s industry-leading optical character recognition technology to enhance their application’s document processing capabilities.

Wait, What Is OCR Again?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that converts different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files, or images captured by a digital camera, into editable and searchable data. At its core, OCR works by analyzing the graphical elements of a document and recognizing the patterns of characters or symbols present in it.

Initially, the OCR software segments the document into elements like lines or words and then further breaks them down into individual characters. Using machine learning and pattern recognition, it then matches these individual graphical components to their corresponding textual elements in a pre-defined character database. This process allows for the extraction of textual data from images, enabling digital storage and efficient searching, which facilitates streamlined management and utilization of information across various sectors.

Benefits of PrizmDoc’s OCR API

Building OCR features into an application is a time-consuming and expensive process. The technology behind OCR is not only quite sophisticated, but it also requires access to complex and evolving language libraries that allow it to identify text accurately. Obtaining the licenses for these libraries, incorporating them into a new OCR solution, and keeping them updated can be a challenge for developers who are unfamiliar with OCR processing.

With PrizmDoc’s OCR API, ISVs can easily incorporate OCR capabilities into their applications with a simple API call. We’re constantly updating our OCR features to add new languages and forms of character recognition, all of which can be rolled directly into software applications as part of the PrizmDoc API integration.

What Makes Accusoft’s OCR Different?

Accusoft has long been an innovator in processing solutions that incorporate OCR technology. Where many solutions offer only full-page recognition, our OCR products support zonal field recognition, which allows applications to focus on predefined form field types to extract key data like names, dates, emails, and identification numbers.

Zonal OCR significantly increases processing speed, allowing applications to extract data from documents more quickly. It also enhances accuracy since the OCR engine is only reading specific areas of the page instead of scanning the entire page.

Of course, if your application needs to OCR an entire page or document, our OCR technology is more than capable of doing so quickly and accurately. We support multiple Western and Eastern languages, including Central European, Cyrillic, Baltic, and Asian characters. You can even set confidence levels for recognition results to incorporate manual reviews into your document process.

Industry Applications of OCR Technology

Fintech Applications

By integrating OCR technology into Fintech applications, financial institutions can automate the extraction of data from physical or digital documents, such as invoices, contracts, and bank statements, eliminating manual entry and reducing errors. This not only saves time but also enhances accuracy and efficiency, facilitating quicker decision-making processes. It can also aid in compliance and auditing tasks by easily retrieving information from a vast array of documents. By incorporating OCR APIs, Fintech applications can significantly enhance the finance industry’s service quality, fostering a more data-driven and customer-centric approach.

Legaltech

When integrated into a Legaltech application, lawyers, paralegals, and other professionals can utilize OCR technology to swiftly convert scanned documents, agreements, and legal briefs into searchable text. This can significantly expedite research and case preparation, allowing legal practitioners to efficiently sift through large volumes of text to locate pertinent information. It also enables the creation of digital databases that can be easily navigated and organized, enhancing the retrieval of case-related documents and fostering a more streamlined approach to legal work, thereby saving time and resources.

Insurtech

For ISVs building solutions to support insurance companies, an OCR API can serve as a pivotal tool in modernizing and streamlining the processing of numerous document types, including claims, policies, and supporting paperwork. It facilitates the quick conversion of scanned documents and images to searchable text formats, which can automate data extraction and reduce manual handling, minimizing the risk of errors and expediting claim processing times. By automating a significant portion of administrative tasks, insurance companies can focus more on developing customer-centric strategies and solutions, fostering greater efficiency and effectiveness within the industry.

Govtech

Governments handle a vast array of documents – from forms and applications to historical records. By implementing OCR technology into a Govtech application, governmental agencies can automate the data extraction process, thereby drastically reducing manual labor and minimizing errors. This makes the archival and retrieval of documents more efficient, fostering transparency and ease of access to public records. Furthermore, OCR can aid in analyzing data from various documents to formulate better policies and decisions based on historical and current data trends. Ultimately, integrating an OCR API can pave the way for more streamlined, cost-effective, and citizen-friendly governmental operations, promoting inclusivity and digital literacy.

Expand Your Application’s Potential with PrizmDoc OCR API

Incorporating advanced OCR capabilities into your application is easier than ever with the release of PrizmDoc’s OCR API feature. To learn more about how you can quickly add full-page and zonal character recognition that supports multiple languages, talk to one of our PrizmDoc experts today.

Document management solutions are well-equipped to handle common file types like DOCX and PDF format. When developers are building software to manage workflows and make files accessible through web-based applications, they can typically turn to HTML5 viewers and document processing integrations to provide the document features their customers require. 

When it comes to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, however, there are some additional considerations that often create difficulties. One aspect of XLSX workbooks that deserves special attention is how applications manage, secure, and control spreadsheet formulas.

Securing Proprietary Formulas

Many financial services and insurance organizations depend upon proprietary information like specialized, unique formulas to provide their customers with beneficial insights. Insurance underwriters, for example, may have a special calculation they use when setting their rates, while an investment firm likely has a risk formula that helps them to identify best opportunities for clients.

Such formulas are often the product of many years of work and experience in the industry and are inexorably linked to a firm’s service offerings. If customers or competitors were able to access those formulas directly, they may be able to adapt them for use elsewhere without the original firm’s permission.

Spreadsheets pose a unique challenge in this regard because the typical workbook contains many formulas, some of which may contain proprietary information. This may not be much of a problem for internal use within an organization, but it could become a problem the moment those spreadsheets are shared with someone outside the organization or with someone who lacks the proper authorization. While cells in an Excel spreadsheet can be hidden or password protected, these protections can potentially be breached by someone familiar with Microsoft security features once they’ve downloaded the file.

Maintaining Spreadsheet Control

Anyone who has accidentally deleted or changed some portion of a spreadsheet formula in a single cell and wrecked calculations throughout a workbook knows how important it is to keep those formulas locked from unnecessary editing. If the workbook is being shared with multiple users, the odds are good that someone will make a mistake somewhere, potentially altering important calculations and providing a misleading portrayal of the available data.

The challenges are even greater when spreadsheets are shared online. A public facing Excel spreadsheet used to make financial calculations, for instance, could be rendered useless if someone were to alter (knowingly or unknowingly) the formula information in a cell. And if the workbook is downloadable, undetected formula changes could be passed on with the file, making it difficult to know which copies of the workbook are accurate and which ones contain errors. 

Protecting Spreadsheet Formulas with PrizmDoc Cells

Developers have long faced two choices when it comes to managing spreadsheets within their applications. One option is to manage the XLSX files themselves while depending upon Microsoft Excel to actually open and view the spreadsheet. While this approach maintains the full functionality of Excel, it creates serious control issues as the user is required to download the file from the secure application environment. If they make changes, they can then upload the file again, creating a potential for version confusion.

The other option is to keep the spreadsheet in application storage, but render it as a print preview in an HTML5 viewer. While this approach certainly protects spreadsheet formulas, it’s also little more than a static view of a spreadsheet, which is only useful if an existing spreadsheet needs to be reviewed and not interacted with in any way.

Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Cells is an API-based integration that allows developers to securely embed XLSX files within their web-based applications while retaining the ability to edit and interact with them. A financial planning workbook, for instance, could be embedded within the browser to provide much of the basic functionality users are familiar with from Excel. This makes it ideal for applications that require a balance of usability and security, such as a digital vault that keeps vital financial data within a secure environment.

When uploading an XLSX file for display using PrizmDoc Cells, there are a few options that make it easy to protect valuable spreadsheet formulas.

Formula View/Edit Settings

There are two formula options that developers can easily adjust based on the needs of the application or the use case of the customer. The “canView” setting determines whether or not formulas are even sent to the browser for viewing. If set to “false,” any formulas within the spreadsheet will be automatically hidden. The “canEdit” setting either gives or denies users permission to edit or enter formulas. Hiding formulas is ideal for situations involving proprietary information, while editing restrictions are more suitable for internal workflows designed to reduce human error.

Value-Only Upload

When an XLSX file is uploaded, all cell values and formulas are normally preserved. This allows the workbook to retain the same basic functionality it has in Excel. For situations where the spreadsheet’s values need to be shared, but no changes are being made to the formulas, PrizmDoc Cells can upload workbooks as “values-only,” which removes all formulas from the embedded version. After being uploaded in this way, the spreadsheet can then have individual cells redacted as needed to further enhance security. Text can be placed in redacted cells to indicate why values were removed.

Enhance Your Application’s Spreadsheet Functionality

As an API integration, PrizmDoc Cells integrates smoothly into any web-based application. It also interfaces seamlessly with PrizmDoc Viewer to provide a broader range of viewing features when it comes to spreadsheets. Whitelabeling features allow developers to customize and rebrand the UI as part of their own software solution.

Find out how easy PrizmDoc Cells makes it to manage spreadsheets within your application by downloading a free trial. It’s the best way to get a close up view of how this powerful integration performs within your dev environment.

The software development industry is changing more rapidly than ever before. With new technology hitting the market on a regular basis, software vendors need to become flexible enough to adapt to the top coding trends if they want to remain competitive.

After a tumultuous 2020, the industry has seen a number of key trends emerge in the first half of 2021. Here are some of the top coding trends worth watching in the second half of the year.

Top 5 Coding Trends of 2021 (So Far)

1. Open-Source Evolution

Developers have been turning to open-source solutions for some time now as a quick way to integrate new features into their applications. While there are a lot of great benefits to using open-source code, it’s not always the simple solution that it appears to be. Substantial work may need to be done to implement the specific features an application requires. More importantly, open-source solutions rarely offer much in the way of support or security updates, and there can also be complicated intellectual property issues to consider when incorporating open source code into a proprietary application.

That’s why many innovative developers are using stable open-source solutions as a foundation for creating more feature-rich software SDKs. For teams building new applications, it’s often much easier to implement one of these integrations because it will require far less configurations and additional coding to get up and running. They can also get the benefits of dedicated support and not have to worry about whether their new integration will create any legal issues down the road.

2. UX Design

With the proliferation of Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms and the widespread use of open source development resources, it’s becoming easier for organizations to find the applications that suit their business needs. What they can’t always find, however, is a solution that’s easy for their employees and customers to use. That’s why the quality of an application’s user experience (UX) is quickly becoming a key differentiator in the software market.

Rather than implementing UX features at a later stage of the coding process, developers need to consider how users will interact with their solution from the very beginning. Software needs to be intuitive and easy to implement out-of-the-box. This applies equally to end-user products and developer-focused SDK integrations. No one has time to struggle with software that’s difficult to use. If a solution proves too cumbersome and hard to implement, customers will likely turn to a competing product that offers a better user experience. The more time developers spend considering their software’s UX, the better they’ll be able to adapt it to customer needs in the future.

3. Responsive Mobile Support

For many years, there was a somewhat artificial distinction between mobile software development and desktop development. But in a world where half of all internet activity comes from mobile devices, no developer working on web-based applications can afford to consider their software “just” for desktops. Just as website designers have been building pages that respond dynamically to different screen sizes and control interfaces, developers must also account for the unique characteristics of mobile devices.

The unique characteristics of mobile screens present specific challenges regarding the application’s user interface (UI). Simply providing standard desktop controls is bound to result in a frustrating mobile experience. Mobile responsive applications can accommodate touch-specific controls (such as pinch-to-zoom) without compromising the desktop experience at the same time. Developers must think about what kinds of devices their software solutions will be used on if they’re to build features and tools that will truly benefit their customers.

4. API Integrations

Today’s developers no longer need to build every feature their application might require from scratch. Thanks to a new generation of web API technology, it’s easier than ever to find software integrations that can quickly and easily add vital features without having to dedicate weeks of development time to building them. Understanding which web application features can be incorporated via a REST API helps development teams to focus their limited resources and time on the truly unique features that will help set them apart from the competition.

Utilizing web API technologies can streamline sprints and shorten development time significantly. That’s because much of the “trial and error” work of building a new feature is eliminated. Rather than designing and testing new capabilities for months, developers can simply implement a tested and proven web API integration within a matter of days. That helps to keep budgets under control and development schedules on track to make targeted launch days.

5. Remote Work

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world in early 2020, many software developers transitioned to a remote workplace arrangement. As other industries begin to tentatively return to the office, tech workers seem to have become quite accustomed to working remotely. According to a late 2020 survey conducted by Indeed, nearly half of participants reported that they now have the option to work remotely on a permanent basis, with 95 percent of them planning to do so. Perhaps even more telling, however, was the finding that 60 percent of tech workers are willing to take a pay cut in order to keep working from home.

Software vendors will have to accommodate these expectations if they hope to remain competitive when it comes to finding and retaining talent. Project managers should not expect work patterns to go back to the way they were before the pandemic. They will be better served focusing on how to organize remote work efficiently and how to provide the resources developers need to be productive while working from home. Transitioning to a more remote workforce is also allowing organizations to tap into a much broader pool of talent, which will help to bring more diverse voices and experiences into the development process.

Keeping an Eye on Future Trends

The software development teams at Accusoft are always looking ahead to see where today’s coding trends are leading the industry. That’s why we’ve been building easy-to-implement, lightweight SDKs like the free-to-use Accusoft PDF Viewer alongside our stable of versatile API solutions like PrizmDoc Viewer. We also continue to make ongoing improvements to our products to provide a better user experience for customers.

Our collection of software integrations can help development teams keep up with today’s top coding trends. Whether you’re looking to quickly integrate new features into an existing application or are looking for the right tools to support your next project, we have the API and SDK resources to keep you on-budget and on-time. Check out the Accusoft Resource Center to learn more.