MIcrofiche Scanning and Insurance Policies

Many small and giant insurance companies or organizations that provide or manage insurance benefits to workers (such as governments and unions) keep their records on microfiche. This used to be the standard, and in fact, many organizations to this day still work with the fiche as opposed to using a microfiche scanning solution, which would digitize the entire collection.

There are many benefits in which microfiche scanning can help such organizations:

- Microfiche scanning would use less labor to accomplish the same tasks.
- Microfiche scanning allows more productive use of employee time
- Microfiche scanning reduces office filing space
- Microfiche scanning enables cost savings by eliminating a storage warehouse or paying a company to store and retrieve your fiche (you know who they are).

Most insurance fiche I've seen contain policy number, name, and sometimes social security number. A policy holder may have records covering more than one individual fiche. Generally speaking most retrieval systems use a multi-page tiff or multipage pdf named by policy number and/or name. Other final file formats include single page files linked to a load file or database.

The first reaction of an organization with insurance records on fiche is to buy their own scanners. Once they realize how large the pricetag is, they may settle for a cheap scanner or reader printer and simply digitize the fiche on an "as-needed" basis. However the most ideal scenario is to simply send the fiche to Generation Imaging to convert the backfile and ongoing requests. This solution is the one which many companies have told us they regretted not doing first.

Is your company old school?