In the last month, I've had to visit the same doctor's office about six times. It seems I developed cataracts in both eyes. I opted for the surgery, and everything went very well.
Not being a frequent visitor to doctors' 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, another was an older Canon fax machine, and last but not least was an older A4 Panasonic copier. They also had a small Fujitsu scanner that they used for scanning insurance cards.
Scanning the insurance cards into their EMR software is a good thing. The eye center also has a new website where you can request and change appointments, view payments, bills, and medical notes. I also saw many PCs and was surprised when I saw a few nurses with notebooks. Awesome, I thought, they really have it going on!
Every new patient is bombarded with at least six or seven forms that are printed on the HP (I asked), 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 the forms and reports for the surgeries, and she explained that they were printed on another printer (I was not able to see that one). Thus, the wheels started to turn, and I would estimate that this eye center is probably printing at least half a 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 of these devices. I figured two decent MFPs could, on the low side, save them as much as a penny per page. At a penny per 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 this awesome technology, but their imaging systems are straight out of Bedrock.
I think that while their IT provider may be awesome at navigating them through the maze of IT technology, they are probably a bunch of dopes when it comes to imaging. This leaves an opening for someone like me to ask the question, "When does your IT provider start to care about your cost per page?"
I’m thinking that will be enough to get me an appointment so we can at least have the discussion about imaging and then move the discussion to the fact that we are also an IT provider. Wouldn't they really want to do business with someone who can deliver both IT and imaging?
I estimate the imaging systems they have are at least five years old. That’s a cool $25,000 that the eye center could have re-invested or saved over the years.
I never told them what I did for a living, but I did ask for the name of the person in charge of their office technology. 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 had had my head buried in my phone (as almost everyone did, except for the elderly), I would have never seen the forest for the trees.
I believe that everywhere you go, there are opportunities; you just need to pay attention.
-=Good Selling=-
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