Every organization, public or private, faces the problem of storing and maintaining massive amounts of documents. These documents exist online (PDFs, Word Docs, spreadsheets, etc.) and offline (paper documents). Retrieving useful information from copious amounts of documents wastes time, effort, and resources. Moreover, there is also a risk of losing or misplacing important documents.
In this digital age, many industries are looking for ways to utilize modern technology and automate the documentation processes in their organization. Intelligent document processing (IDP) has enabled many organizations to do so. It uses multiple applications of artificial intelligence like machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition, computer vision, and more to convert unstructured and semi-structured data into structured ones.
Here’s how intelligent document processing can help some of the major industries.
Industries that will Benefit from Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
In today’s fast-paced world, technology like intelligent document processing can help multiple industries to significantly minimize workforce, while achieving the same output. While outdated methods like data entry are still relevant, employees can use AI-powered tech to increase efficiency.
Here are some industries that can benefit from leveraging IDP.
1. Healthcare
Creating and maintaining patient records is a crucial task in the healthcare industry. Many healthcare units, like hospitals, still rely on paper-based documents. These documents are prone to human error, which can lead to drastic results. Misinformation or misplacement of documents may lead to delayed treatment. Since some patients may require urgent treatment, even slight delays can prove to be fatal.
Intelligent document processing can digitize data like patient records. This will significantly reduce the time required to retrieve and extract important data. Apart from patient records, IDP can also be used to analyze certain documents like X-Rays. Since IDP uses computer vision and machine learning, it can be taught to detect abnormalities in reports.
2. Insurance
The insurance industry generates countless documents in the form of claims. Much of this sector’s workforce is occupied with processing these claims. Human error due to manual data entry in such documents can have dire consequences. For instance, a person may not receive the due payment due to an error in their document. In such cases, digitizing these processes with the help of AI technology can prove beneficial.
Moreover, the IDP technology can also be utilized to detect fraudulent claims. According to research, insurance fraud costs 1.5% of US GDP each year. For example, an individual may forge documents to claim insurance money. To avoid that, companies can use AI-powered optical character recognition and natural language processing (NLP) to validate documents and detect forgery.
3. Legal
The legal sector is another industry that’s known to be document-centric. Law firms across the globe store copious amounts of documents in both paper and electronic formats. These documents comprise mergers, acquisitions, financial reports, emails, faxes, PDFs, and more. Extracting useful information from all these documents can be time-consuming.
With the use of intelligent document processing, lawyers can drastically reduce the amount of time spent reviewing documents. According to the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), as much as 70% of human reviewing can be automated with the help of AI-assisted contract review technology. Moreover, IDP can also help them go through numerous statutes and law cases to find relevant information.
Conclusion
Intelligent document processing is an ever-evolving technology that can be used in many industries. It helps enterprises to drastically reduce the required man force to store, maintain, and extract information from documents. This can increase the efficiency and productivity of industries while cutting down costs and efforts. As time passes, IDP is bound to revolutionize how industries store and maintain data.