Joe Paternoster, director of information, attributes the savings to huge productivity gains from a new content management system designed by Creative Socio-Medics.
Now, there's no more weeding through dog-eared patient files. In all, Paternoster estimates that physicians saved 9,500 hours last year. The hospital spends about $300,000 a year to run the system--about one-third more than the old-fashioned one--but the time savings more than make up the difference.
Unfortunately, most businesses still struggle with paper: managing documents, creating and collaborating on them, routing the finished results to global partners and clients, and archiving it all for fast, secure access. But there is a better way. New software and services, many of which run over the Internet, make it as easy as clicking on a desktop icon to pore over an ad campaign or a set of blueprints. Electronic document management is catching on: Some 70 percent of office documents last year existed solely in digital format compared with a mere 10 percent a decade ago, according to Dataquest.
So is paper finally dead? Not yet. In fact, digital processes that boost productivity often result in even more paper output. A company uses 8.8 million more sheets of paper for every $100 million its sales increase, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. And printer maker Lexmark predicts that by 2010, worldwide paper consumption will total 8 trillion pages compared with 3 trillion last year.
"We're very physical animals," explains Rich Gold, manager of Xerox's Research of Experimental Documents Lab at Palo Alto Research Center. "The more people use computers, the more they print out." Also, people retain information better when they read it on paper. Gold says the paperless office is still 20 years away. "It'll feel more like a paper-full office, but using electronic paper," he predicts.
In the meantime, there's plenty your company can do to integrate digital and paper documents more effectively—and garner big savings.
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