Office Scanner Tailored For Compliance

With an eye toward streamlining security and compliance procedures in a post-9/11 world, Panasonic released the KV-S1025 Color Duplex (CD) Workgroup Scanner. The scanner includes Panasonic’s unique “double-exposure” technology, which can automatically scan and combine the content of both sides of an ID card or document into a single electronic image.

A single-pass color or grayscale option speeds scanning by automatically removing up to three colors or color range from a document during scanning. Panasonic says the CD Workgroup Scanner has a list price of $1,049, while its non-duplex model (the KV-S1020C) lists at $949. The scanners are designed for front office, decentralized scanning environments such as those in health care, pharmacy, transportation, insurance and financial services.

“Such applications require that data be captured at its point of entry from a wide variety of media such as hard ID cards and traditional paper media such as NCR forms, onion-skin paper, plain paper and specialty long forms, such as EKGs,” Gary Bailer, product manager for scanners at Panasonic, said in a statement.

Post-9/11 compliance regulations such as the Patriot Act, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley require businesses to increase documentation of their procedures, operations and customer interactions.

In the case of health care, a patient is typically required to provide a variety of ID cards and paper documents. These may include a driver’s license, a primary insurance card, a secondary insurance card, a patient information form, a HIPAA release form, a consent-for-treatment form or an authorization for release of medical information.

The new Panasonic scanners have an edge over traditional scanners that can’t handle the multiple shapes, thickness and size of the various IDs and documents.

“The workgroup segment of the scanner industry, scanners in the $500 to $2,000 price range, are becoming the most competitive and fastest-growing segment of the market,” said Jon Franke, a consultant with InfoTrends. “The health care industry is ripe for a product like this,” he said. “At the typical check-in area or nurse’s station, patients must fill out multiple forms and present multiple IDs.”

“With this product’s ability to scan cards and paper, the office worker can conceivably just throw all a patient’s documents on the scanner, have it automatically detect them, launch the scan application on the station’s computer, and go from there.”

The duplex KV-S1025C offers single-pass color, grayscale and binary duplex-scanning rates of up to 52 images per minute, while the non-duplex KV-S1020C offers single-sided scanning at up to 26ppm.

Adapted from Internetnews.com.