Service Bureau Scanning Prices

Owning and implementing your own imaging system means designating your own resources to processes you probably know very little about. In many cases outsourcing your document imaging project will be less costly than trying to do it yourself. The general imaging prices listed below are for informational purposes only.

Document Scanning

If you generate 100,000 images per month and require one to four indexing fields, you could expect to pay between 6 to 12 cents per scanned image. This would amount to a monthly imaging bill of 6 to 12 thousand dollars per month. This bill includes document preparation, quality control, one weekly document pick up, document retrieval software, technical support and CD or DVD creation.

Additionally, at least one field should be double keyed to ensure data accuracy. Expect your vendor to also include additional fields that may be populated via a table lookup using a customer supplied table.

The only additional costs to consider would be document destruction or long term storage. Document destruction costs are approximately $5 for a standard banker box. Warehousing costs can get quite expensive. Most document warehouses charge for pickup, returns, monthly storage and destruction. Most warehouses will charge a pull charge before shredding a box of paper.

If you are not comfortable with per page pricing, project pricing is also available. All you need to do is show the actual paper, work out the project details and a price can be negotiated for the entire project.

Forms processing

Sometimes just creating an image from a piece of paper is not enough. Reading and converting all the printed data into ASCII text may be what you need to achieve your objectives.

To process 3000 HCFA claim forms per day you could expect to pay about 35 to 55 cents per form. In this scenario you should be given the option getting your data back in a HIPAA compliant ANSI 837 format or ASCII text. Daily document pickups and claim date stamping are included in the per form processing price. Basically, no other fees should be charged in above mentioned per form price.

Some HCFA forms are easier to process than others and that’s why prices vary. A typewritten form printed on red background is far easier for service bureau to process than a handwritten HCFA form. It is common to be charged different prices for Dropout forms utilizing OCR versus handwritten or black and white forms where OCR can not be used. Pricing also depends on the amount of fields the end user would like to have captured.

So much goes into forms processing, make sure every last detail is spelled out before you commit to any vendor. Always do a fair comparison when comparing competing quotes.

Hidden Fees are common in the imaging industry. It is a cut throat business and as such, you must make sure you are dealing with an honest and up front vendor. If a promised per page price sounds too cheap to be true, run away. Giving a low scanning price of four cents a page with no indexing fields is easy for a document scanning company but that doesn’t provide the customer with much value. Other tricks include charging high fees for pickups, double keying, extra index fields, search and retrieval software, document preparation, quality control, and CD or DVD authoring.

Always make sure there are no fees for pulling and returning, faxing or emailing documents back to you before the scanning process is completed. Many companies will charge you as much as $15 for pulling a document and faxing it back to the client.