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Ways to Run an Environmentally Friendly Office

2010-06-03T08:57:00.004-05:00

Article From www.thenewbusinessblog.com by Brian Carr

Whether you run an entire office or are just the king of your cubicle, there are some pretty easy things that you can do to help make your work space a more environmentally place.
Since it looks like being green is here to stay, it’s probably about time that you jumped on the bandwagon and took advantage of some simple ways to help reduce your office’s carbon footprint:

Turn off your computer when you leave for the day. Unless you’re planning on coming back in the middle of the night and you absolutely have to have your computer already up and running, go ahead and power down for the night.
Turn off the lights in common areas once everyone leaves. There’s no point in leaving the light on in the copy room if it’s going to sit unused for 13 or 14 hours each night. Same goes for every other common area in your office.
Get some small indoor plants. If you’re lucky enough to have an office with a window, most any plant should do ok. However, if you don’t have a window, make sure you do a little bit of research and check out which plants can survive in your office without lots of direct sunlight.

Use Energy Star certified equipment. From your monitor, to your copier to the vending machines in the lunchroom, make sure that all of the equipment you use in the office is Energy Star certified.

Start a recycling program. Get some plastic, glass and aluminum bins for the lunch room, and put recycling boxes in printing rooms. It’s pretty easy to do and it might even show that you have some initiative. That being said, you’re going to want to make sure that you don’t recycle company sensitive information; you’ll definitely want to shred that instead.
Don’t print if you don’t have to. The biggest use of trees is for paper, so theoretically, if we reduce the amount of paper we use, we’ll reduce the amount of trees that get cut down. And if you have to use a ton of paper, go the green route and buy recycled office paper.
Bring in a coffee mug. Instead of getting a new styrofoam or disposable cup each day, bring in a regular coffee mug from home and just rinse it out at the end of each day. This is a great and simple way to reduce needless trash.

While this certainly isn’t the be all, end all of ways you can make your office more environmentally friendly, this list is a pretty good place to start. And the best part is, doing many of these things won’t really put you out or force you to change too many habits.

I know it sounds pretty cliche, but if each of us would do just a couple of small things to reduce our impact, we could probably do a lot to help stave off the global environmental crisis.

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Progress Towards the Paperless Office

2010-06-03T08:53:00.002-05:00

Article From www.greentechmedia.com by Oso Oseguera

The paperless office is the classic example of something that hasn't yet occurred despite being just around the corner for decades. But by combining it with search capabilities, PaperlessUSA says it is making progress toward this ever-elusive goal.

"My focus was not on building a software application, but on giving users a path to find information to make the task easier and quicker, while creating a profitable business," says Paul Stansen, CEO of PaperlessUSA (PUSA). While an estimated 9 trillion pages a year are confined to computer screens, the number of printed pages stands at around 2.8 trillion worldwide -- and believe it or not, that number is growing. Behavioral research conducted for the printer manufacturer Xerox found that office workers discard 45% of everything they print on most days, a waste stream that is equal to more than a trillion pieces of paper every year. The most popular 'one-time use' examples are daily assignments, drafts and emails. Others include cover sheets, e-tickets for flights, and directions printed in lieu of maps.

The printing company estimates that 351 items contribute to an organization's total printing costs. Despite efforts to go paperless, the amount of information printed is doubling every 3.5 years. An average office generates two pounds of waste paper daily. And the average American corporation or government organization has roughly one output device (printer, copier, scanner, fax) for every 2.5 employees. Also, printers consume a lot of electrical power, including phantom power when devices are in standby mode. An organization that reduces two-thirds of its supply of output devices could use up to 50% less power.

In 1999, as a real-estate attorney in a paper-intensive profession, Stansen decided not to waste vast amounts of paper by printing out documents. Instead, he made a concerted effort to use less paper and minimize his interaction with printed documents. Not only that, Stansen wanted a software solution that would let him retrieve precise data instantly. He searched the commercial market but no solution he found was specific to his kind of work. What's more, the few solutions he did find were hard to adapt to his needs and were complex to manage. So Stansen decided to write the application himself.

"I did it myself. Computer people think like computer people. What I need is a system that is basically a useful application, whether working with an accountant, a CEO, a businessman, a CTO, a government agency or a law firm. The reality is the same: an organization is an organization," he asserts.

Without knowing anything about computer programming, Stansen just sat down at a PC and began designing his application. "I tried to keep it simple. It took me about three to five months because it is a combination of what you want and how to organize and put it in a user-friendly environment on the Internet," Stansen explains. Today, more than a decade later, he is still upgrading the platform, based mainly on the PDF document format.
PUSA implements proprietary methodologies to image and integrate client data in one browser format. Documents co-exist with photographs, video and audio files, so that users can source all relevant information quickly and easily.

More powerful use of digital data is enabled because his system can search images for target text-words and phrases. PUSA transforms scanned documents that can be searched without loss of original-quality visual integrity.

"We can maximize a reader's ability to find a needle in a haystack when faced with thousands of pages, or whenever specific information is needed quickly. Text can be highlighted, searched, even extracted from the image and pasted into preferred word-processing software for new uses. Imagine the power of searching multiple documents containing thousands of pages with the same search parameters; imagine, too, audible read-back functionality," Stantsen notes.
PUSA's customers can receive a DVD or can look for the information on the company's website. In addition, PUSA implements security measures to assure that readership and data use is controlled. PaperlessUSA can limit access to all Adobe PDF files by assigning passwords and restricting features such as printing and editing.

James Daloisio, an attorney in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office (Major Fraud Division, Real Estate Fraud Section) said the search function has saved "untold hours of searching for a document with a particular name, address or phone number on it."

Southern California Edison, meanwhile, employs the program on Rule 20A construction bidding projects. Before PaperlessUSA, each project consisted of stacks and stacks of documents and photos that were reproduced up to twenty times through distribution to qualified subcontractor bidders.

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Professional Way To Manage Documents

2009-12-01T15:33:00.002-06:00

To maintain documents in hard format is very tough task. It is very tiresome and time-consuming task. It also requires huge space to store or preserve. To maintain hard format document, company have to spend money on management and maintenance. After spending huge amount of money, there may be misplaced document which cost the company a lot.
Most of the time companies are loosing big opportunity because of unmanaged document and lack of information. By having document scanning, companies can grab big opportunity very easily. Document scanning is a process of converting hard format into digital format. Documents are scanned into digital format and preserved into digital devices or storage holder.

Let’s check out how document scanning helpful to manage document:
Records: To track the record of document access, you must require a person to mange the list which includes all the information such as who access, which document, when accessed, etc. It is very hard to find particular information, if there is large amount of document transactions going on. By having document scanning, one can easily track record of document access.

Access: In company, there are various documents which are very confidential and only accessed by higher authority. If the hard copy is available in the premise, one can access by hook or cook. If it is scanned and available digitally, higher authority can give security for such important information. One can easily find who access the document at what time.

Search: If there is urgent requirement of any document, it is very difficult to search hard copy. You can easily search digital document within few clicks.

Space: Hard copy requires more space for storage. One must save space to decrease the capital cost. If you can manage in less space, your capital cost goes down deeply. This way you can save huge money too. It is possible through digital format of document. It requires very little space for storage compared to hard copy.

Time: One can easily save time of document retrieval by using digital document. Digital documents save time of searching that way you can definitely see the improved productivity.
So, document scanning helps you out to manage your document professionally and cost effectively.

Information Courtesy of www.articlesbase.com

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Don't wait until next year to implement EMR

2009-11-30T12:00:00.002-06:00

Physician practices and hospitals that have yet to select or implement an EMR system should get a move on. Those who wait until next year will face a "high risk" of failing to achieve "meaningful use" of health IT in time for the 2011-12 federal incentives, Mark Leavitt, chairman of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, warned at the annual AHIMA conference on Monday in Grapevine, Texas.

"You're dreaming if you think you can achieve it in less than a year," Leavitt said, referring to hospitals. Achieving meaningful use of an EMR system will take at least 18 months, if not two years, he warned.

HHS expects to publish its criteria for certification of EMRs under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as well as its definition of "‘meaningful use" for qualifying for ARRA Incentives, by the end of the year. Both measures should be finalized by spring 2010 after a public comment period. All told, the federal government will pony up $34 billion in incentives for meaningful use of certified EMR technology--the equivalent of what the U.S. spent to send the first man to the moon, Leavitt said

Read more: http://www.fierceemr.com/story/dont-wait-until-next-year-implement-emr-leavitt-warns/2009-10-06#ixzz0YTVn0XTO

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3 Different Types of Document Scanners

2009-11-15T15:31:00.001-06:00

Are you in need of a document scanning solution for your business? Companies of all sizes are discovering that they need a high-quality professional scanner to make their jobs easier. The most important thing to know when buying this product is that there are three core types of document scanners which are each different from one another.
Those three types of document scanners are:
Flatbed Scanner. This type of document scanner is probably the type that you have already used before. This is the type of scanner which requires you to lift the lid of the scanner and to place the sheet to be scanned on a piece of glass. The image scanner within the machine moves across the page and scans it in this manner.

Sheet-Fed Scanner. The sheet-fed scanner actually works in much the same way as the flatbed scanner. The difference for you as a user is that you don’t place the sheet that you are scanning on to the glass. Instead you feed the sheet through the scanner.

Hand Held Scanner. Not too many people have used the handheld scanner but it is good for certain types of businesses. As the name suggests, you actually hold the scanner and move it across the page that you wish to scan.

Before buying a document scanner you should figure out which of these three types of scanners are most appropriate to your business. That will narrow down your shopping choices considerably and make it a lot easier to choose the scanner that is right for you.

Info From www.instantkeywordresearch.com

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Document Scanner

2009-11-01T15:38:00.001-06:00

It’s hard to imagine what people did before the advent of document scanners. These handy electronic devices allow anybody with a hard copy of a document to place it on a flat bed or insert it into a document feeder, hit a button, and then viola, they have a digital copy of their document. One can only imagine how much the secretaries and administrative assistants of the past would have loved to have had one of these handy document scanners back in the days before office technology was readily available.

The basic definition of a document scanner is that it is a device that can be used to convert a document, an image, handwriting or even an object into digital format. The most common types of document scanners are known as desktop or flatbed scanners, and their usage is very simple. Someone places something that they want to convert to a digital image – perhaps a fax just received, a schematic drawn up by the engineering department, or even a knick knack that they wish to sell on an online auction site – onto the document scanner’s flat surface, and push the button (usually located on the document scanner itself or accessed through software used to program the document scanner.) This produces a document on the computer to which the scanner is hooked up. From there, the user can manipulate the document, share it with the world, or generally do just about whatever he or she wants with it. Document scanners are very handy devices in the home, office or anywhere else, and the technology is older than you might think.

Document scanners can actually trace their history back to the 1920’s with the early telephotography input devices. Basically, these early versions of document scanners consisted of a rotating drum with a single photodetector at a standard speed of 60 or 120 rpm (later models up to 240 rpm). They sent a linear analog AM signal through the standard telephone voice lines to receptors, which synchronously printed the proportional intensity on special paper. As with much modern technology, document scanners have been around for quite a bit longer than they have been commercial available and affordable to most consumers.

Desktop or flatbed scanners are not the only types of document scanners available, either. Handheld scanners, though less common than desktop or flatbed document scanners, are out there. Handheld scanners, sometimes called wand scanners, are not useful for document scanning though. Instead they are used in industrial applications such as for industrial design, reverse engineering, test and measurement, orthotics, etc. They are also used in gaming and virtual reality.
Document scanners are becoming an ubiquitous part of the modern household and office. They are becoming just as important as the other office staples – computers, printers, faxes and copy machines, and that is why they are often bundled together with peripherals that have those other functionalities in “all in one” packages. For example, popular all in one bundles these days include a printer, a fax machine, a document scanner, and a copying machine all in one single electronic device.

Document scanners have proved their usefulness to in the office and in the business of making money, but they have also proven their use in other ways. For example, historians and genealogists have co-opted scanners for use in their hobby. Genealogists – people who study family history (their own and others) – have been known to use scanners to send pictures of relatives, important places, important and very aged non-electronic documents such as wills and military records, to relatives who have dispersed all over the world. Truly the document scanner is a diverse invention that is being used in many disparate ways.

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Going Digital

2009-10-15T17:23:00.001-05:00

Electronic medical records can improve care and reduce errors
Doctors and hospitals are making the switch

You're seeing a new medical specialist for the first time, but there's no paperwork to fill out. Instead, this physician has everything about you at her fingertips—your medical history, your primary doctor’s notes, the results of your lab tests, the medications you're taking. In seconds it's all on her computer screen.

Or maybe a doctor is writing you a prescription for a newly diagnosed condition. But first he looks at the computerized records to be sure this drug works safely with other meds you're taking, and to see if it’s covered by your insurance. Then, with a push of a button, he sends the typed script to the pharmacy. You needn't worry that the doctor's handwritten scrawl will mislead the pharmacist into giving you the wrong drug.

This is the future, but for some patients it has already arrived, as more doctors and hospitals get "wired" by moving to electronic record keeping and paperless prescribing.

Health information technology (HIT)—the bland umbrella term for this revolution in health care—promises vast benefits that go way beyond convenience. "By computerizing health records, we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs and improve care," President Bush said in 2004 when announcing a plan to get most Americans connected to electronic records by 2014.

Getting there means overcoming many obstacles, even though the medical community—from doctors and nurses to hospitals and insurers—recognizes HIT's benefits. "HIT has huge potential, and in the next several years it will become much more universal than it is now," says Don Goldmann, M.D., a professor at Harvard Medical School and vice president of the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass. "But we shouldn't underestimate the complexity and cost."

Above all, HIT raises big questions about patients' privacy rights and sensitive information getting into the wrong hands. That issue, still far from being resolved, has for now stalled Congress' efforts to speed up the process of implementing electronic records nationwide. As many as 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical errors, according to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. Another 1.5 million people are harmed by errors in medications.

Even simple technology can help reduce errors—typing instead of handwriting a prescription, for example. More than 3,000 drugs have names that look or sound like others, according to the U.S. Pharmacopeia, the official standards-setting authority for medications.

But errors can be made by keystroke as well as by scrawl. And that's why experts say a full "e-prescribing" system, especially when combined with e-records, offers greater safeguards. If a doctor accidentally types the wrong drug name when the patient's diagnosis is already in the system, it can trigger an alert that the drug doesn't fit the patient, says Allen Vaida, executive vice president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit in Huntingdon Valley, Pa. "The software can give alerts for drug interactions and allergies and dosing. So if you happen to key in 200 mg when it should be 20, it says this dose is out of the range, so check it."
Providing instant checks and feedback for prescribing doctors—and even giving them quick access to the latest medical research—is a major advance in improving the quality of care, says Steven Waldren, M.D., director of the Center for HIT at the American Academy of Family Physicians. "It's like jet pilots. They know how to fly the plane, but every single time they get into a jet they have a checklist," he says. HIT "can provide the same functionality, so that the right thing is done on the right patient at the right time—every time."

In hospitals, another new safeguard is a bar code embedded in the patient's ID wristband that can access the medical record. To ensure correct treatment, nurses use a device like a supermarket scanner to check the bar code repeatedly.

Linda Mays, 59, a Board of Elections clerk in Delaware, Ohio, noticed this when she had surgery at her local hospital, Grady Memorial. "They scanned it when I left for the operating room, when I was in the holding room and just before I fell asleep," she says. "It made me feel safe." Storing a patient's record in one file that several providers can access in seconds can prevent unnecessary tests and lots of wasted time, doctors say.

Rebecca Fogel, M.D., a family physician now in Brooklyn, N.Y., had her first experience with e-records at a community clinic in Providence, R.I. "In a word," she says, "it was fabulous."
Making sense of a patient's paper chart—a binder maybe two or three inches thick—and trying to decipher previous notes on faded pages has "reduced me to tears of frustration" on occasion, she says. "At best it's maddening, but at worst it's dangerous."

Searching an electronic record on her laptop is easy and reliable. "You keep clicking, and different screens pop up—the patient's meds list, problem list, allergies, test results, past surgeries," she says. "It's all there."

Another plus: If a patient calls at night or on the weekend, the doctor can access the medical record on a home computer instead of relying on memory. And the system can instantly generate reminders of when patients are due for tests, checkups or shots. "It just enhances what you can do for the patient," Fogel says.

But some systems are more reliable than others, and converting to electronic records can be complicated and expensive. A basic system for doctors' offices can cost $20,000 to $80,000. Still, the number of U.S. doctors in small practices using e-records is growing, reaching about 28 percent in 2007. Recent bills in Congress would offer doctors grants, loans and other incentives to go digital.

The legislation also sets the stage for achieving "interoperability"—the buzzword for enabling different digital systems to share records seamlessly.

But the big challenge is privacy, a concern of patients, doctors and policymakers alike. People need to feel confident that their medical records remain private, or they won't want them in an electronic system, says Deborah Peel, M.D., a psychiatrist from Austin, Texas, and founder of the Patient Privacy Rights nonprofit group.

"We don't have to get rid of privacy to have health IT—in fact, we can have far more exquisite privacy protection with technology than we can with paper," she says. "But in this world that's the Wild West, where anyone with a database feels free to use and sell your records, we need a safe place to keep records that we control." That place could be a national health bank "with state-of-the-art Fort Knox security," she says.

New legislation, Peel says, is needed especially to protect personal health records (PHRs), into which patients can import their own medical records. "A PHR is not an official health record, so no laws cover them," she says. "That makes them a perfect setup for data mining." Patients should have a legal right to control all their medical information, Peel argues, with penalties for those who breach it.

But that’s a political sticking point in Washington. Some people, like Peel, want privacy rules enacted first. Others want to let the market resolve the issue. Still others, in the face of congressional gridlock, favor legislation that would set up an independent body to develop regulations outside Congress.

"That's the most pragmatic approach," says John Rother, AARP policy director. "We need to both protect privacy and advance HIT as fast as we can."

Source: AARP Magazine March 2008

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Go Green!

2009-10-01T15:35:00.001-05:00

With document scanning your files and documents will be kept organized, easily accessible, and backed up online. Document scanning your paper files is the most efficient way of keeping your files in order. Scanning all your paper work, you can upload it to a disk or online account. You can eliminate your office of all the filing systems, saving money by increasing profits through improved proficiency, organized information management, and low overhead costs. Easily accessible to you, document scanning is environment friendly and cost efficient.

Info Courtesy of www.NJSeal.net

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