Companies still collect much of their critical information via pen and paper, yet they ultimately need this information to be available in their digital systems. How much do companies rely on this handwritten data, and how do they then convert it to the digital data they ultimately need? This recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management  (AIIM) gives the answers:

Companies rely on handwritten data…

www.aiim.org/research/Aiim-White-Papers/forms-processing

Of the companies surveyed for the study,  50% identified handwritten information as important to their business processes and a full 25% identified it as playing a key role for them. This data could be generated internally, through employee evaluations, culture surveys, site inspections, invoices, walk sheets, etc. It could also come from current or potential clients, in the form of newsletter signup sheets, registration forms, raffle tickets, satisfaction surveys, comment cards, mail-orders forms, purchase orders, and even signed contracts. 

…But they struggle to convert handwriting to digital data

www.aiim.org/research/Aiim-White-Papers/forms-processing

While companies rely on handwriting to collect data, they need that data entered into their computerized systems quickly and accurately. How are they bridging the paper and digital worlds? The reality is that most companies live with a painful disconnect between their data collection methods and digital data needs. More than half of those surveyed enter the data by hand, while another third rely on OCR, and another 12% use ICR (intelligent character recognition). Before Captricity, there really were no other options available.

Manual Entry, OCR & ICR are Woefully Inadequate:

Unfortunately, all three options – OCR, ICR, and manual entry – come with significant trade-offs in terms of flexibility, turnaround time, and/or quality.

• All of us at some point have dealt with manual data entry. It’s slow, often expensive, not always accurate, and can lead to significant lag times in getting your data. Many companies tell us they have backlogs of months or even years that their manual data entry staff just have not been able to deal with.

• OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts images of text into a digital, machine-readable format. While it tends to work adequately for well-scanned and printed text, it is extremely inaccurate for handwriting, and yields only a “bag of text”, not structured data. In other words, if you start with a scanned, typed form, OCR will give you a .txt file, not a data set. And if you start with a form filled in by hand, OCR will give you very little useful data at all.

• ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) was created to more accurately read handwriting. If you have ever filled out a driver’s license application or customs form, you’re already familiar with the highly-regulated ICR-ready forms, where boxes or “combs” (small vertical lines) separate each letter. While this system can read hand-printed text a bit better, it’s as limiting as a Scantron bubblesheet is to teachers who want to ask open-ended questions. ICR makes free-form text and short answers almost impossible. Furthermore, setting up ICR-compatible forms takes time and expertise, requiring significant up-front investment. For the vast majority of those organizations that rely on handwritten data, this is not a practical solution.  They are in a tough spot.

Enter Captricity for REAL handwriting recognition.

Our unique data capture technology was created specifically to turn any handwritten form, no matter the format, into digital data quickly and accurately. Multiple-choice, numerical response, likert scale, short answers and long answers are no problem! There is minimal set-up and no software to install.  Take your completed forms, scan or photograph them, and upload the images to Captricity. Our special mix of computer algorithms and human intelligence extracts data faster than manual re-keying and more accurately than OCR, with more flexibility than ICR.

Find out more

Captricity is already helping companies turn valuable handwriting into the digital data. Some companies send us a steady stream of invoices that they need fed into Salesforce, others send us user satisfaction surveys or event reports, while still others rely on Captricity to capture exam scores or survey data. Read more about how they’re using Captricity (and what they say). What type of data does your organization rely on, and how are you collecting it? If you fall into that 50% of companies for whom handwritten data is valuable but hard to manage, we are here to help. Try Captricity now (for free) or contact us to discuss more!

We all know we should be getting regular check-ups, but between scheduling a visit, missing work, dealing with insurance (or paying out-of-pocket), it’s too easy to procrastinate to next month, year, decade.  But what if the doctor came to you, at work, and your employer actually encouraged you to take a 30-minute break for a quick visit? As it turns out, this model of work-site preventive health exams is rapidly gaining traction as a win-win for employees and employers.

Catapult Health, a true innovator in this space, currently provides between ten and thirty clinics per week, each on-site in a different location (usually a work-place). In one 30-minute appointment, employees receive a  consultation with a Nurse Practitioner, a panel of basic, potentially life-saving tests, and a full personal health report and action plan to help them improve their health going forward. If they’re at high risk of developing problems down the road, nurses will even follow up to make sure they’re doing well and on track to improvement. Employees love the convenience, efficiency, and accuracy of the results. Employers, meanwhile, understand that their investment in a one-day health clinic will get them healthier employees, less productivity lost to illness, and lower long-term spending on employee health.

Catapult doesn’t just expect employers to intuitively understand the benefits, though; they prove the ROI. After each visit, Catapult generates detailed reports, including, among other things, an aggregate summary of employees’ health and also a patient satisfaction report. They pride themselves on closing the loop with employers quickly after each visit, and are seeing the demand for their services increase in part because of this careful reporting.

We at Captricity have been happy to help Catapult improve their reporting speed even as they scale up their services. Catapult realized that paper-based patient satisfaction surveys are key to maintaining response rates of over 90%. However, getting data entered from those paper forms was becoming a bottle-neck in their otherwise efficient, digital workflow. Captricity, and our integrations with Box and Salesforce, save them the trouble of data entry while integrating directly into their workflow. How does it work? Thanks to our Box integration, staff at eight regional offices could scan their surveys directly to Box. Just before going home for the day, staff at the central office could instantly pull hundreds of surveys from across all those sites directly from Box into Captricity.  When they come back to work in the morning, the data is entered, and a quick button-click pushes it straight to their Salesforce application for instant reporting. Theoretically, less than 24 hours after a visit, Catapult can close the loop with employers.

Would you like to know more about Catapult or how they can help out your company? Currently they’re operating in Oklahoma and Texas, with plans to expand to more States soon. Learn more about their work here!

Interested in knowing more about how Captricity can help with your paper forms? Try it out now  (for free!) or contact us to learn more!

Upload paper forms, get back structured, digital data.

Do you have paper forms piling up? Looking for a better way to capture data from them without having to spend hours typing every last detail into your computer? Good news: Captricity’s web-based data entry solution just got even easier to use with the addition of our Magic Inbox. Just upload scans or photographs of your filled-in documents, and automatically get back structured, digital data. Captricity will do all the hard work for you.

What is Magic Inbox?

If you’ve used Captricity before, you know that it automatically captures data from paper forms, saving you the trouble of data entry. However, you also know that Captricity needs a template to help guide its data capture. You used to have to create that template document yourself. No more! Now, Captricity’s advanced technology can do it for you. Just upload your documents and let Captricity create your template and automatically run your job. The template stays in your account so you can reuse it in the future, and your digital data is ready for you to review, download, or export to Salesforce, Constant Contact, or any other database or web service you use.

How Does it Work?

Capture data from your paper forms in just a few easy steps with the Magic Inbox:

1. Upload 10-30 sets of the same document here.
2. Wait for an email telling you that your job is complete. Follow the link in the email to view your data.
3. Have more of the same documents to enter? No problem! Captricity created a template for you that you can use with as many documents as you’d like.

Try it Out!

Could this data capture solution help you? Give it whirl! Your first Magic Inbox submission is free.

Captricity has always offered fast and accurate document processing for individuals within organizations. Now, we’re happy to launch new functionality enabling colleagues across an organization to collaborate more easily.

New Features for Organizations:

Do you have multiple people working with the same forms, needing access to the same data? Now they can all share templates, billing, and access to jobs.

• Create a custom-branded Captricity organizations account, displaying your own logo and organization name
• Invite multiple users to collaborate, and control user permissions
• Decide which templates and jobs are shared with collaborators.
• Centralized billing to organization owner
• Best yet – Organizations are free to set up and use, for a limited time.

How Can You Use It?

Captricity’s core technology already captures digital data quickly from paper forms.

Events: Three consultants for the Bridal Magic Tradeshow survey vendor and client satisfaction. Prior to the show, their manager printed 500 surveys and set up an organization and templates on Captricity. During the show, each consultant snaps photos of surveys as they are completed, immediately uploading through Captricity’s mobile app. By evening of the first day, they and their manager sit down, analyze the digital results, and make tweaks to improve the show’s remaining two days.

Canvassing: Candidate Jane’s campaign team has 150 volunteers armed with walk sheets and pledge forms. After canvassing, they turn in the documents to their team captains.  Instead of spending hours entering each form manually, team captains drop the forms in a scanner and upload to Captricity. The campaign pushes data to their Force.com database using Captricity’s SalesForce integration, and queues up immediate followup emails and phone calls.

Construction: The fifteen site supervisors at Dave’s Construction complete logs, specs, safety inspections and time sheets. The forms are standard; each supervisor prints them out and fills them in on-site. Since the central administrator added all site supervisors to Dave’s Construction group on Captricity, they each scan and upload of all their forms directly to Captricity. The central administrator and each supervisor get fully digital data at the end of each day.

Want to Try it Out?

Setting up an organization is simple and free – click on your Account page when logged in to Captricity, and click “Add Collaborators” next to “Organization.” This page walks you through setting up an organization (it takes just a couple minutes).

Obama’s first term in office brought in innovative technology leaders like Todd Park, Bryan Sivak and Vivek Kundra, to name a few. With his reelection, we can expect four more years of their and others’ continued work in the space of government data. But what does that really mean? We at Captricity have been thinking about open government a lot since participating in Code for America and launching our Open Data Portal. So we’re particularly interested in knowing: What does Obama’s re-election mean specifically for open data in government?

As it turns out, answering this question is not simple and involves a quick jaunt through history. Open Government policies arguably start with the signing of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, following uneven enactment since then, including an essential cordoning-off of government data under Bush (George W) and a re-opening of data under Obama, with some specific steps to make data not only open, but accessible in a meaningful, useful way.

Some important dates and events:

• 1966 – President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The FOIA requires all government agencies to release data requested (by individuals, media, etc) within 20 days, unless the data falls under one of the nine exemptions (i.e. is “classified”).
• 1966 – 2001 – The FOIA was amended and updated, but remained mostly unchanged.
• 2001 – 2009 - George W. Bush, in his tenure as President, essentially told government agencies to claim exemptions as often as they could (i.e. “classify” as much data as possible)
• January 2009 – On Obama’s first full day in office, he issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government that reversed Bush’s mandate, making “accountability through transparency” a priority and launching the the Open Government Initiative
• March 2011- foia.gov was launched to bring together data on and published under the FOIA in one place
• July 2011 – the international Open Government Partnership was launched, partially due to prodding by Obama in September of the previous year. The US is one of a handful of countries to have produced a country plan. (Read more here)
• March 2012 – the White House launched the Big Data Initiative, including $200M in R&D commitments from six governmental agencies, aiming “to greatly improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data.”
• May 2012 – Obama released this memo summarizing certain requirements of a Digital Government Strategy meant “to build a 21st century digital Government.” Among those requirements were establishing centralized repositories of data and making all of that data machine-readable by default. (Ideas we’ve heard many times before from our friends Tim O’Reilly and Jen Pahlka and their “Government as a platform” ideas)

While we may take the FOIA for granted, history shows that policies of each President can in fact largely affect its implementation. Obama’s government brought about a number of new decrees and initiatives to move open government forward, and judging by those alone, the next four years look promising.

Outcomes, however, paint a slightly different picture. While data request processing time has improved, particularly in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,  and there are fewer backlogged requests, those improvements vary between agencies and do not necessarily translate into increased transparency. Many agencies still lag behind in honoring requests for data, and many more continue to classify a worrisome amount of data. In September of this year, Bloomberg news published an article reporting that only 14% (8 out of 57) of agencies from which data was requested fulfilled that request in the required twenty days. Some never fulfilled it all, or redacted large amounts of data. The Federal Times reported in October 2011 that both the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security refused seemingly straightforward requests. The Hill reported six months earlier varied responses from over seventy federal agencies from whom reporters requested information on people filing FOIA requests. Different agencies responded with different speed, ranging levels of redaction, and a wide variety of formats, including handwritten.

Given past policies and outcomes, what can we expect for the future? I’m inclined to put on the rose colored glasses and say we’re headed in the right direction. If there’s anything my Health Policy background taught me, it’s that large-scale political change is usually incremental and always hard-fought. With that in mind, the changes made in these past four years are encouraging and certainly moving us in the right direction. With Obama in office for another four years, it seems that we can expect another four years of progress…perhaps slower than we would like, but still in the right direction. And given the new policies, directives and funding for open government, it is an exciting time for anyone looking to make a difference in the space.

Captricity grew out of our founder, Kuang Chen’s PhD dissertation research in rural East African health clinics. Since then, we have maintained a firm commitment to all those working to improve their local and global communities.

In celebration of Giving Tuesday, we at Captricity wanted to take a moment to recognize some of the truly inspirational non-profits we’ve had the opportunity to work with, while putting out a call to all organizations:

Today, we’re giving away 250 pages of FREE data digitization to all nonprofits. To redeem, simply email hello@captricity.com or Tweet @captricity us today. No strings attached, just free services to help support these organizations who are already giving so much to help others.

What are some of the organizations that have so inspired us, or where can you donate on this Giving Tuesday?

Cradles to Crayons provides children from birth to age 12, living in low- income and homeless situations, with the essential items they need to thrive at home, at school and at play. (More on Cradles to Crayons and Captricity’s work with them)

Fonkoze, the largest micro-finance institution in Haiti, offers a full range of financial services as well as programs that contribute to the economic and social improvement of the people and communities of Haiti and to the reduction of poverty in the country. (More on Fonkoze and Captricity’s work with them)

Deworm the World improves the health and education of school-age children across the globe by supporting governments and development partners to expand school-based deworming programs. (More on Deworm the World and Captricity’s work with them)

Captricity is often compared to handwriting recognition software (or handwriting OCR software), and while we do offer some of the benefits of this technology, we also offer much more. In this post, I’ll describe how Captricity’s combination of human intelligence and advanced computer algorithms is unique, setting our technology apart from standard handwriting recognition OCR software.

This clip from a results page shows the original handwriting snippet alongside the entered text.

This page describes more about how Captricity works, and this video shows it in action. For the purpose of this post, all you really need to know is that Captricity’s core functionality is this: It extracts chunks of information, even handwritten information, from a paper document and enters that information as digital data in a spreadsheet or data file. So you upload a couple hundred of, let’s say, registration form scans, and Captricity will give you back a spreadsheet and data file, or even spit the data straight into your CRM or database through our API. In the short while between the time you upload the scans and get your data back, Captricity has computer algorithms and real human workers cranking on the data. This use of both computer and human intelligence to create structured, digital data from handwritten paper forms is what sets Captricity apart from straight OCR. How? Well…

Captricity is more accurate than OCR, particularly for handwriting

Nothing beats human intelligence for truly understanding whether that sloppily-scrawled vowel is an “o” or an “a.” There is no OCR out there yet that can accurately read handwriting from a large number of individuals all at once. That level of processing and comprehension still takes human beings. Captricity employs all the highest standards in ensuring high-quality data, providing human-quality, even double-key-entry accuracy.

Captricity gives you structured, machine-readable data

Captricity doesn’t just turn handwritten (or typed) text into digital text; instead it turns paper forms into entire structured, digital, useable data sets. While straight OCR might take your pages and give you back the same pages, just digital, Captricity extracts all the names from each page and puts them into one column of a spreadsheet, then does the same with dates, email addresses, etc. With a click of a button this data can be analyzed in Excel, inputted into your CRM, or uploaded directly to a database.

Captricity is web-based; there is no software to download, no large contracts to sign.

Most software solutions out there require complicated downloads, expensive licenses, and often special scanners or other (expensive) hardware associated. Captricity, however, is entirely web-based: create an account in 15 seconds and you’re ready to get started. There is no software to download, and Captricity works with images of forms captured with any scanner, digital camera, or even camera phone. Our standard per-page pricing means that you can also use the service for as few or as many documents as you’d like without signing constrictive contracts. Sign up and within a couple of minutes you’re ready to get started. It’s as simple as that.

All that said, there are certain benefits to OCR, all of which Captricity maintains through its use of advanced computer algorithms:

Low Cost

By using computer algorithms for part of the work, Captricity can more efficiently use paid worker time, giving high quality results at a fraction of the cost that manual entry of similar quality would cost. What’s more, you pay only for what you use.

Fast Turnaround

Again thanks to Captricity’s algorithms and elastic pool of workers, we can get thousands of pages of data entered in well under one day, with a dozen pages often taking less than an hour.

Try it yourself

Don’t take our word for all this, though – try Captricity out yourself. Your first 25 pages are free!

We are happy to announce today that, after an extensive private beta, our API is freely available to the public. The just-launched RESTful API can pull images or PDFs of paper documents from almost any source and push digital data into databases, websites, and apps. Captricity’s unique service blends advanced computer algorithms and real human work to quickly and accurately capture digital data from paper, making this far more than just an OCR API service.

Many of you have already benefited from Captricity’s web-based service. A recent suite of integrations with cloud-based services and a Captricity mobile app have helped Captricity fit more seamlessly into many of your workflows. The API takes that one step further, allowing Captricity to integrate seamlessly into existing workflows.

Would you like to use Captricity’s API to create an integrated end-to-end processes bridging paper-based workflows and digital data processing in your business or organization? Find full documentation here, or sign up here. We’re also always happy to speak more – email us at developers@captricity.com with any questions or to set up a time to chat more.

Captricity’s API will be put to its first test this weekend at the Code for America hack-a-thon, where CfA fellows, members of the CfA Brigade, and a  community of programmers focusing on civic technology and open data initiatives will come together to hack on Captricity’s API and open data sets. Stay tuned for updates on some of the excited new applications to come out of that!

Are you a developer, designer, or community advocate passionate about improving our government through technology? Have a killer idea for leveraging the power of open data to  kick corruption out of California, or improving our education system through a nifty app?

If so, our upcoming hack-a-thon, sponsored in conjunction with Code for America and LearnSprout, is the place for you!  Captricity will be leading the government track, with LearnSprout taking the education track.  Free food and beer for all participants, plus some exciting prizes for the best apps. Check out the details below, and RSVP here.

When:

Nov 2nd 6:30PM – 8PM (mixer/kickoff), Nov. 3rd 9AM – 7PM(hackathon)

Where:

Code for America HQ: 155 9th St, San Francisco, CA.
Sign-up: http://datadeathmatch.eventbrite.com

What:

Choose your track  (government or education) and hacker team during the mixer/kickoff on Friday, and spend Saturday hacking away to come up with the best solution. Here’s what the two tracks will cover:

Government: We recently launched an Open Data Portal, making important structured, machine-readable data publicly available. The Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) (CA’s official watchdog agency) is making the 2011 economic interest filings of some California officials available on this portal. For now, that means a lot of spreadsheets and CSV files free to download. The task for you is to take that structured data and make it more understandable and useable by the general public. Our staff as well as staff from the FPPC will be on hand to help you through the process.

Education:  LearnSprout recently built the first-ever API that allows you to tap into live data from a school or district’s Student Information System (SIS). This opens the door to countless possibilities that would have been impossible before without access to live data. Educators and the LearnSprout staff will be on-hand to help you develop and integrate your app.

How:

Want to join in? Find more information, a complete schedule, and free tickets here. We look forward to seeing you at the hack-a-thon!