In the last month I’ve had to visit the same doctor’s office about six times. Seems I developed cataracts in both eyes. I opted for the surgery and everything went very well.
Not being a frequent visitor to doctor’s offices, these trips to the same Eye Center piqued my interest about how much paper they use. This particular Eye Center had three separate print devices (all A4). One was an older HP that was just used for printing, the other was an older Canon fax, and last but not least was an older A4 Panasonic copier. They also had a small Fujitsu scanner that they were using for scanning insurance cards.
OK, scanning of the insurance cards into their EMR software, that’s a good thing. The Eye Center also sports a new Website where you can request and appointment, change an appointment, and view payments, bills, and medical notes. I also saw many PC’s and was surprised when I also saw a few nurses with notebooks. Awesome, I thought, they really got it going on!
Every new patient is bombarded with at least 6 or 7 forms that are printed on the HP and at the end of your visit you are then presented with another two to three sheets of paper. When the time came for the surgeries, each patient’s file had at least another 20-30 sheets of paper (additional forms, and reports).
I was there twice for surgery in two weeks and each day they had 15 cataract surgeries planned. I asked one of the nurses at the Eye Center where they get all of the forms and reports for the surgeries and she explained that they were printed on another printer. Thus, the wheels are starting to turn. I estimate that this Eye Center is probably printing at least a half of million pages per month!
When you’re as old as me, you can make a good guess as to what the cost per page is for each one of these devices. I’m figured two decent MFP’s could, on the low side, save them as much as a penny a page. At a penny a page that’s $5,000 per year.
But, the question I really want to ask them is, “Why Does Your IT Provider Not Care About Your Cost Per Page?” They’ve got all of this awesome technology and their imaging systems are right out of Bedrock.
I’m thinking that while their IT provider may be awesome at migrating them through the maze of IT technology, they are probably a bunch of dopes when it comes to imaging. Which leaves an opening for someone like to me to ask the questions, “When Does Your IT Provider Start to Care About Your Cost Per Page”?
I’m thinking that will be enough to get me and appointment so we can at least have the discussion about imaging and then move the discussion that we are also an IT provider and wouldn’t you really want to do business with someone that can deliver with IT and imaging?
I’m thinking the imaging systems that they have are at least five years old. That’s a cool $25 grand that Eye Center could have re-invested or saved over the years.
I never told them what I did for a living, I did ask for the name of the person who is in charge of their office technology and in a few days I’ll be calling for an appointment with a wealth of knowledge about their paper workflow. It may or may not pan out, but if I would have had my head buried in my phone (as almost everyone did, except for the elderly), I would have never seen the forest through the trees.
I believe that everywhere you go, there are opportunities; you just need to pay attention.
Good selling!
