One of the biggest boosters of business office efficiency lately has been the use of scanners to generate images that can be stored electronically thus eliminating the need for the storing of paper copies.

Although the benefits of scanners are rather straightforward, the impact on the practice is normally quite significant in terms of space, effort, time and cost:

• No leaving the front desk to go to the copier to run a copy of an insurance card.
• No more physical storage of insurance card copies and hard copies of EOBs.
• Since there is no physical copy of the card or the EOB, it can't get lost.
• When the insurance or EOB information is needed, personnel do not have to physically hunt and retrieve the hard copy. Neither do they waste the time necessary to return it to the storage location.
• Viewing of the images is available to anyone on the network.