The State of Scanning

Insurance is a highly regulated industry, and it shows with the amount of documents it’s required to maintain. According to a recent survey, insurers are scanning up to 100 pages per day. Anoto, a provider of digital pen technology, surveyed businesses ranging anywhere from 50 to more than 200 employees across a wide variety of industries, including insurance, and found that organizations have significant scanning requirements due to a continued reliance on paper. Some of the major reasons include the need to keep an electronic record (71 percent) and because the data is easier to work with in digital form (55 percent).

Insurance-specific results include:

• 100 percent of employees have a scanning requirement

• 78 percent of survey respondents cited they scan because it is a legal requirement; 89 percent said it is because they want an electronic record; 78 percent said it is to back up printed files; 67 percent said it is easier to transfer the data and 89 percent said it is more cost effective than maintaining a paper archive

• 89 percent said that the business as a whole requires scanning every day and that 90 percent stated that time spent ranges from an hour a day to five hours or more

• 100 percent stated that the business scans upwards of 100 pages per day

Of the 200 legal, financial services and insurance company employees surveyed, the vast majority (81 percent) of employees said they had a scanning requirement and noted that time spent on the process each day is significant, with 44 percent of employees spending between one and five hours or more a day just scanning paper documents.