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Electronic Data Capture Form Data
Forms Processing is the automated capture of information from forms. While this term has historically referred to data extracted from paper forms, forms processing has come to mean the capture of form data from a variety of form types – paper, scanned images, electronic, or a combination.
A forms processing capture software application automatically captures the data from fields in transaction – based documents such as medical claims, tax filings, parking tickets, account payments, and surveys.
This data may be captured automatically as the form is created, or documents may be handled extensively before being sent to a data capture center for high speed processing. Although efforts to automate capture have been made for more than 130 years, OCR and other techniques for automated data entry and forms processing did not become viable until electronic digital data processing equipment was developed and installed in the mid – 1940s.
Capture, forms automation has been approached from six different methods that were initially developed for commercial applications in the 1960s. These are OCR (Optical Character Recognition), MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition), OMR (Optical Mark Recognition), barcode, multi-font OCR, and Hand Print Recognition—often referred to as Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR). These were used independently depending on the primary purpose and origination of the data.
In the early 1990s, PCs, networks, scanners and capture technologies had matured to the point that these recognition applications could be combined and effectively applied to a generic bitmapped image of a document to enable automatic data capture. This significantly reduced data capture costs on a wider variety of forms lower-cost, mass-produced capture hardware. This was the basis of today’s forms processing systems, and we are still reaping the benefits of these capture approaches.
Once a specific sub-set of data capture, forms processing has matured from the extraction of information from printed forms to include the processing of data from virtually any document type. Whether electronic or paper, structured or unstructured, forms contain a wealth of business-critical information. An understanding of the capture systems that categorize, recognize, classify and process these forms should be an integral part of an information capture professional’s body of knowledge. Effective form processing begins before a form has been created and captured.
The design of a form makes a profound difference in how accurately the form can be captured and automated. Clear design, clear instructions and paper considerations will all impact the ease with which a form can be handled. Creating effective forms, which means forms that not only can be captured readily, but ones that the user can understand and fill out accurately, requires a collaboration between forms designers, capture professionals, the organization or department that requires the form, and the form users themselves. A myriad of details go into effective form design. Font, color, spacing, layout, lines and graphics will all influence how a form is handled.
One of the great challenges of forms processing is integrating both electronic and paper process simultaneously. Sometimes overlapping, and often duplicative, these paper and electronic workflows may never be fully integrated.
This excerpt on Electronic Data Capture was taken from the Information Capture Professional Handbook. Order your Information Capture Professional Handbook here.
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