Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) uses modern technology and human validation to turn your content into structured, usable data.
AI is a primary component that works in conjunction with machine learning systems to acquire data and business rules about documents. It quickly extracts and structures essential fields, so they’re searchable and accessible. The reward is that it’s much faster and requires less human interaction than manual or OCR processing methods.
Who is IDP for?
IDP is best for any organization looking to do the following:
- Get access to data trapped in documents like physical paper or digital PDFs
- Eliminate employees having to do manual indexing, which is prone to errors
- Quickly find information via keywords as you would search on Google
- Get data into a centralized system accessible to your entire workforce
- Reduce risks associated with paper records like physical damage or not meeting compliance requirements
The benefits of IDP
Mass volume document processing
Take advantage of intelligent data extraction from documents, images, e-mails, PDFs, invoices, contracts, videos, forms, surveys – any content you have. You could have thousands or millions of physical and digital documents from which you want to capture and structure data. IDP can handle it all.
Streamlined data management workflows
Data intake, with the help of Intelligent Document Processing, is the first step to improving how your organization manages data. It’s crucial to ensure you’re capturing essential data from content your employees and stakeholders interact with daily and making it accessible to jumpstart every other process within your data management lifecycle. You know, those processes that rely on complete, accurate data.
Improved security and compliance
Like many of us, you need to be sure your data and your data processes meet security and regulatory compliance requirements. If your outdated data processes are becoming more of a risk, impacting every aspect of your organization, data intake with IDP is a starting point.
To achieve automation, provide audit trails, and better compliance reporting – IDP is a way to get you there.
Less data waste
How often have you wished you could get all the information from your PDFs or handwritten forms into a searchable format in the systems you work in daily?
So much of our data is wasted or ignored because it’s not fast or easy to capture that information manually. This unstructured or semi-structured content could easily reshape how quickly you get answers to your employees and stakeholders. Intelligent Document Processing makes it possible to use data just sitting on your shelves or in a digital folder as needed.
Immediate data access
As IDP captures, extracts, and structures data from your content, it’s then delivered to your most critical systems and databases. That means you’re increasing visibility of your information by any team or department regardless of location.
Reduced human involvement
IDP uses AI and machine learning to extract and structure essential data points, but it doesn’t do this without the help of human intelligence. People are involved, feeding the machine to show it various document types and teaching it the data to look for. Humans also validate the machine’s work. However, IDP is not totally reliant on human labor.
98% or higher data accuracy
Humans aren’t perfect. Neither is AI. But when paired together, they’re a powerful team.
IDP is a starting point for better data management that can further your modernization efforts, like reducing physical storage costs, gaining insights and analytics, and building a delightful stakeholder experience.
Types of documents compatible with IDP
This list of document types can help you understand what IDP is capable of. This is not a complete list by any means, but data from these common records can be structured – no problem.
| Business | Healthcare | Government | Energy |
| Mail and e-mail | Patient onboarding forms | Vendor invoices | Billing and invoices |
| Bill of lading | Patient records | Survey data | Well logs |
| Invoices | Patient experience surveys | Constituent feedback | |
| Purchase orders | Medical billing and invoices | Application and registration forms | Taxes |
| Certificates | Referrals and letters | Permits | Contracts |
| Tax documents | Physician notes | Vital records like birth, death, and marriage certificates | Land rights |
| Contracts | Consent forms | Case management | Books |
| Applications and forms | Research papers | Tax processing | |
| Surveys | |||
| Claims |
The technology behind IDP (spoiler: it still takes a little people magic)
One of the main differentiators between OCR and manual indexing is that IDP uses artificial intelligence and machine learning for document processing.
Here’s what that looks like behind the scenes:
- Humans teach the machine by feeding it many document types and giving it rules to tell it what data to extract (stay in your lane, bots).
- Over time, AI can start to understand and structure data independently.
- AI-powered document management isn’t 100% accurate every time, but it is much more precise the first time than humans are; Any document that doesn’t reach your confidence score is sent to a queue to be reviewed by a real person.
- Once data is structured, it’s delivered to any system or database. That could be an ECM, EMR, ERP, data warehouse, or anywhere.
What’s next?
If you’re thinking Intelligent Document Processing could benefit for your organization, here’s a more in-depth guide to help you understand the true value so you can communicate it better to the right people.
