20 years of Capture Innovation

In the mid 1980s, Scott Blau met Noel Kropf at a lecture given in New York City by Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ computer language. Soon after that, Scott introduced Noel to IntelliMED Corporation, where he was directing development of hospital operating room scheduling and data collection software.

In 1988, the two saw opportunity to capitalize on the emerging microcomputer revolution, along with the new generation of low-cost digital scanners to automate data entry. Up to that date, only high-cost, integrated solutions were available, and those only to the very highest volume users, such as tax authorities or large insurance companies processing tens of thousands of forms a day. Scott and Noel’s vision, was to develop data and document capture software using “off-the-shelf” microcomputer hardware, thereby offering lower costs and more flexibility to users.

The first product release, known as Paper Keyboard®, was written for the most advanced graphical operating system environment available in that era: the Apple Macintosh.  By the early 1990s, as Microsoft strove to catch up, Datacap became one of the first 100 software vendors to develop for the fledgling Windows 3.0 release.

Much of the early development of Datacap software was funded by projects in the healthcare industry. One of the early customers was the American College of Physicians, who automated the questionnaires used in their recertification process.

The client-server platform opened opportunities for major applications and broadening customer acceptance.  In this period, one of the largest acquisitions of forms processing software that ever took place was completed when the Veteran’s Administration invested in a system-wide, i.e. 200 hospitals, implementation of Taskmaster..

At the ten year mark, as recognition technologies evolved and capture workflows became more complex within Taskmaster, Datacap began to focus on developing vertical applications for high volume documents.  Datacap was one of the first to solve the challenges of capturing medical claim data and soon, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, Group Health Cooperative and other large payers adopted the Datacap Health Claims capture system (now called Taskmaster for Medical Claims) built on top of Taskmaster.

In 2000, having rung in the new millennium without the feared Y2K disasters, Datacap became the first capture vendor to develop a web-based scanning and indexing solution, Taskmaster Web.  With browser-friendly capabilities, companies like Sirva and Taylor Bean and Whitaker were early adopter to distributed scanning at hundreds of remote sites nationwide.

Datacap has always kept its focus on data and document capture with a goal of reducing the labor required to input paper-based data.  Identifying document types is an important part of the process and often one that requires significant labor before scanning. In 2007, with the release of Taskmaster 7, Datacap introduced Datacap Wordfire, the industry’s first automatic classification software that uses text analytics to identify a document based on its content.

Today, Datacap celebrates its 20th year and prepares to roll out Taskmaster 7.5, the latest version of its flagship capture software, newly enhanced with support for .NET, more browser-based capture functionality than ever before, more SOA capabilities, and the most advanced invoice and medical claim capture solutions in the business.

It’s been two decades of hard work, a little fun, and more hard work, but there’s no doubt that it’s been made easier by having great people to work with, interesting challenges, inspiring partners, and the best customers in the world.

Here’s to 20 more!