Streamline document processing with Cognitive Capture

Today’s Post by: Roger Welch, Senior consultant, IBM Analytics

IBM Datacap has never been more exciting than it is right now. There’s a palpable anticipation with new tool sets that is leading SME’s to discover all the new possibilities. The advancements of text layout analyzation brought to us by the Insight Edition coupled with our integration to natural language processing technologies such as SystemT allow Datacap to cognitively understand unstructured content like never before. These abilities are in their infancy, and our clients are desperately looking for us to mature them as quickly as possible. This is what drives the anticipation at times. But everyone sees the potential. And everyone wants in.

Let’s back up a little bit and understand the basics before we blow the roof off content capture and extraction. For decades everyone understood the mantra of capture. Ingest, Classify, Extract, Validate, Verify, Re-Validate, Export. Classification was the link between processing and exception handling. Figure out the classification first and then we will know what to extract. Name the process before applying the process. Well, you can say goodbye to that.

The future of content capture and extraction is looking to we skip the classification and go straight to the extraction of key pairs. Any business process is keenly aware of their content or key pairs. For example, it takes 6 pieces of information to move money from 1 bank account to another bank account. As the pieces of content start to match into key pairs of a business process, the system begins to create a validity score. I don’t need to know the piece of paper is a telegraphic transfer before looking for the content. If I find the 6 pieces of content then I know exactly what I’m supposed to do. Classification is an afterthought.

Take for example receipts. They are everywhere. Ingest one or one hundred into the new Datacap Insight edition and we’ll tell you what day it’s from, where you went, and how much you spent. Or if you are a developer and really want to explore what’s possible, integrate to other dictionaries that will also tell you if you over spent your per diem rate or if it met with your care and wellness plan.
I no longer care where you’ve hidden the content – correspondence, table structures, line items, or traditional forms. Give us a global list of key pairs that process lines of business and we’ll start processing business. That’s cognitive capture with Datacap. Learn more through Cognitive Capture video.

Person, Place or Thing: Datacap Insight Edition and AlchemyAPI

Today’s Post by: Mark Martin, Senior Offering Manager, ECM, IBM

We’ve recently released an update to Datacap which provide some interesting enhancements to our Cognitive Capture capabilities. With Datacap Insight Edition, we’re already using capabilities coming from Watson, IBM Analytics and IBM Research to look inside highly variable document types like correspondence, contracts or reports to find and extract important information and to make it available to users and applications for action. With this update, customers can now opt to use IBM Watson’s AlchemyAPI to go even deeper.

AlchemyAPI does many things. With Datacap Insight Edition we use it to find entity information inside documents. AlchemyAPI, is capable of identifying people, companies, organizations, cities, geographic features and other “typed” entities that are inside your documents. Entity extraction is based on sophisticated statistical algorithms and natural language processing technology. It is unique in the industry with its combination of multilingual support, context-sensitive entity disambiguation and comprehensive type support.

There’s more. AlchemyAPI sentiment analysis is capable of computing sentiment at many levels – the document, user-specified targets, entity-level, quotation-level sentiment, right down to the keyword level. These multiple modes of sentiment analysis provide for a variety of use cases and they can return information that leads to understanding the nuances and context of a document. These are just two examples of the broader analytic capabilities that AlchemyAPI provides to Insight Edition – capabilities that you can invoke from directly in line with your Datacap capture process.

So, why is this important? Remember the use case for Insight Edition – valuable, complex documents with variable formatting and content. These sorts of documents are difficult to automate with traditional imaging systems. How do you automate something that requires human understanding and logic to interpret? Well, now, you can use Datacap Insight Edition and take a big step toward that automation goal.

Imagine being able to automatically process incoming correspondence. Each letter is different – different structure, different formatting, and possibly even different languages. Today, this would require manual review to determine the content and to determine the next steps. But Datacap Insight Edition, drawing on AlchemyAPI, IBM BigInsights and other text analytics and language processing tools can automate and accelerate. It identifies entities in the letter and returns person, place and role information like “Joan,” “manager,” “Main Street” and “branch.” It can look for specific industry terms and return keyword-value pairs like “Account Number” and “12345.” It can determine actions and activity like “rude,” “ignored” and the sentiment score – positive or negative and what degree – and more. All this is done automatically and with no prior knowledge of the document. Net result: you know you have a complaint letter from a customer whose account number is 12345, who is in a negative frame of mind because she felt ignored by Joan, a manager who may have been rude, at your Main Street branch. And that is actionable information, information you can use to solve the problem, make a decision and respond correctly.

AlchemyAPI integration is the latest piece of capture innovation from the IBM Datacap team. It requires Datacap Insight Edition v9.0.1. Customers can download the Datacap v9.0.1 Feature Pack 1 from Fix Central here.

Cognitive capture for Banks and Insurance Firms

By Kevin Craine

Despite the increasing digitization of business today, most organizations and many key business processes are still awash in paper. And nowhere is the burden of paper felt more significantly than in the banking and insurance industries. At the same time, an ever-growing amount of digital content is part of the modern information mix.

For banks and insurance firms, managing the variety of documents and media types presents a number of challenges that impact organizational performance, not the least of which is the influence on customer engagement. Customer centricity is a key market differentiator today, and executives are looking to operationalize the strategy and drive key transformational changes. They need to increase employee and customer engagement in order to drive efficiencies and best practices across the organization.
Overcome the Burden

How can you boost customer centricity with ECM? One way is to make your capture system cognitive. IBM defines a cognitive system by its ability to understand, reason and learn; and in a sense, to think. IBM Watson is a cognitive system that can understand data, learn from it and reason through it. Industries as diverse as healthcare, retail, banking and travel are using cognitive capture to reshape their industries. Human cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring understanding through experience…and that’s what cognitive capture does as well.

Organizations today are challenged with meeting business objectives while ensuring a customer-centric approach. Today’s digital businesses struggle with working effectively and efficiently because of complex and variable types of documents and content entering an organization, multiple systems and screens, specialized application silos, and no easy way to record it all. The new dynamic workforce struggles to retain knowledge and access it when needed in order to serve its customers and constituents effectively and consistently across channels.

New Innovation from IBM

IBM is out to change all that with the new release of the IBM Datacap Insight Edition which provides an approach to cognitive capture that is an important tool in building a more customer centric approach for financial services and insurance firms. The system combines advanced imaging, thoughtful business rules, natural language processing, and machine-learning technologies like those used in Watson to automatically classify and extract information in real time from any type of document. This is extremely important for unknown or highly variable documents that directly connect with customers. Until now, those document types have been handled manually. Now, you can automate that process, speed the pace of business and increase responsiveness and service to customers across the board.

Real World Applications

Cognitive capture helps organizations from all industries leverage both unstructured and structured data to continually improve customer service and engagement. By understanding context and aspects of personality, a cognitive business can personalize and deepen engagement with customers. And by collating the most-advanced knowledge available and across the enterprise, the expertise and responsiveness of the entire firm is improved. By spotting patterns in both traditional data sets and unstructured data, organizations can design their activities and strategies to foster customer centricity across the enterprise.

Synergy, Savings and Service

In today’s business environment, there is simply no time for manual ingestion and classification methods when customers expect real time service and the very profitability of the firm hinges on efficiency and customer responsiveness. Cognitive capture provides an important advantage for banks and insurance firms looking to automate manual processes and achieve a higher level of performance and response. With cognitive capture, organizations are in position to engage new levels of case management, analytics and workflow automation that foster systems and strategies for a customer-centric organization.
What to find out more? Check out this video to see how IBM Datacap Insight Edition determines relevant content to extract for business uses, learns and classifies document types for future use and faster processing.

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Guest contributor Kevin Craine is the author of the book Designing a Document Strategy, host of Everyday MBA on C-Suite Radio, and a respected authority on document management and process improvement. He is the managing director of Craine Communications Group. For more information visit CraineGroup.com.

Cognitive capabilities can help transform healthcare operational efficiencies

Today’s Post By: Stephanie Wing, WW Portfolio Marketing Manager, ECM, IBM

As the new year kicks off, many organizations are also beginning a new fiscal year with new challenges to overcome – all on stagnant budgets. So how does an organization do more with less? You become more efficient in the tasks you already perform. While it isn’t always glamorous, improving your operational efficiencies in just a few areas can greatly impact your bottom line.

In the healthcare industry, data pertaining to an individual’s health comes from multiple channels. From the doctor’s notes taken at a hospital or clinic to the wearables that people use to track activity, getting a complete view of a patient’s health means correctly collecting and recording all this information. But how do healthcare organizations streamline the aggregation of that data into a format that facilitates clinicians’ use in patient management? With a document capture solution of course!

Streamlining your document capture process with IBM’s cognitive capabilities can help doctors obtain a concise and complete overview of a patient’s health information, facilitating appropriate patient management. With the traditional document capture systems, healthcare organizations are able to automate the ingestion of standardized forms such as new patient registration and discharge. But what about the data generated before the patient enters the organization? What about documentation generated in the future? Or what about data generated by 3^rd party providers and payers? Until now, automating this type of information capture was a thing of the future, but not anymore.

With IBM Datacap Insight Edition, the power of traditional document capture comes together with cognitive capabilities to automate tasks that are currently performed manually. IBM Datacap Insight Edition is a cognitive capture solution that combines advanced imaging, and natural language processing, and machine learning technologies like those used in Watson to go beyond the limits of traditional capture. It can automatically classify and extract information – including text, photos, and handwriting – from complex and variable documents in real time. IBM Datacap Insight Edition then analyzes the content to understand both the information and context [and helps to bring forward relevant and necessary data quickly to aid medical professionals in making decisions.

For the healthcare industry, this innovation in document capture can impact a multitude of areas. For instance, the examination of a complex medical claim by a 3^rd party payer requires a highly skilled and paid individual to sit down and go through the medical record manually to confirm the treatment provided and that the documentation supports the medical necessity of the treatment. This can be a very expensive and time consuming role. Now, imagine allowing cognitive capture to do the research and digging into the medical record to bring forward the important information. By introducing cognitive capture, processing time for these claims could be significantly reduced. Consider how many more claims could be processed in an hour or a day. How would faster processing impact your bottom line?

As the amount of healthcare information and content continues to multiply, organizations must find a more efficient way to keep up. IBM’s cognitive capture solution does just that.

Interested in learning more about IBM’s cognitive capture technology? To read more, download our IBM Datacap Insight Edition Solution Brief.

 

Day 3 @ IBM Insight 2015

The theme for Day 3 of IBM Insight 2015 was “Make Your Mark – Disrupt Your Marketplace” and the General Session opened with news that spoke directly to the theme: IBM will acquire The Weather Company product and technology business. It was an exciting way to start an entire discussion about the importance of marketplace disruption.

Fredi Lajvardi, Program Director, Center for Marine Science and Carl Hayden High School, Elle Shelley, Chief marketing officer, Local Motors, and Paul Fipps, Chief Information Officer, Under Armour all shared how they have been involved with disrupting their space. Fredi lead a group of high school to a robotics competition where they beat out universities, like MIT. Elle and Local Motors are building 3D printed cars. Paul and Under Armour seek out underdog athletes and their athletic performance experience to build athletic wear. All these industries are experiencing change and those who are choosing to make their mark are leading the change.

The session concluded with Jason Silva, Host, National Geographic: Brain Games facilitating a discussion with Ron Howard, Director and Brian Grazer, Producer. Ron and Brian discussed their partnership and shared stories about films like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind. This conversation demonstrated the importance not shying away from creativity, curiosity, and hardship.

This afternoon we heard from Toby Bell, Marketing and Offering Strategy Lead ECM, IBM in a session titled “The Future of Content is Cognitive.”He argued that without process control, your business can’t be cognitive. What is the future of cognitive? Case Management.

The phrase “case” covers a lot more than you think. A case is any type of work where there’s processes tied to high value for the business and require people to work together – within and outside your company. The value of the case is to keep it open because you want to use Case Manager to leverage your content to keep it working. By collecting this content, you should then strive to inject analytics and then you want to inject your domain expertise. Cognitive case is what will drive to the next level. Every time a decision comes up, cognitive analytics will present itself with what is the recommended action – here is what works, here is what usually does well – which will lead to better customer experience.

The evening closed with a great Rocktober Fest Performance by Maroon 5. The Mandalay Bay Events Center was filled with IBMers, clients, and Business Partners rocking out to some of their most popular songs.

It was another exciting for IBM ECM! Be sure to review our other IBM Insight 2015 posts for coverage on each day of the conference.