When Taha Kass-Hout joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as its first Chief Health Informatics Officer, one of the first things he became aware of was a backlog in an important database. This one database receives about 900,000 submissions every year—10 percent of which are submitted manually. When backlogs would develop, teams of seasonal manual data entry clerks were hired. This year, rather than addressing backlogs with additional headcount of manual data entry clerks, Kass-Hout was interested in finding a more flexible, timelier, cost-efficient and scalable solution with high-quality results.
With Vidado, Kass-Hout found a solution that not only passed Federal security and compliance protocols but also processes large volumes of documents a day in a timely and more cost-efficient way. “For the paper jam we experienced, it was originally estimated to take a very long time to overcome the backlog using the current approach of manual data entry. Vidado was part of a solution that was timelier, and we were able to achieve very high-quality data at a fraction of the cost,” said Kass-Hout.