Document Scanning Blog

With a national goal of moving all medical facilities to electronic health records (EHR) by the year 2011, many health practitioners are scrambling to find an easy and quick solution. Before you set out to find an EMR scanning solution, take inventory of what will need to be done, and how each document scanning solution will accomplish that. The need for electronic medical records (EMR) is expanding rapidly, and there are many new and untested providers out there trying to capture this market. You will want to be sure that the provider you choose is able to meet the specific needs of your organization. First, determine your budget. An EMR scanning solution can be as simple as buying a scanner and some simple software, or it can be as elaborate as a multi-million dollar overhaul of a hospital systems current records and archives. An even bigger question is whether you will have your medical records scanned in house as a capital investment; or if you will outsource the project to a professional document scanning service. No matter which way you choose to make the transition to a paperless practice, the costs cannot be escaped. Plan on spending a great deal of time and resources either way, and compare the costs of devoting a full-time team of employees versus an outsourced provider. In the end, you may find it makes more sense to outsource to a professional EMR scanning company.

One of the main reasons so many offices are still “pushing paper” instead of using an electronic document management system is because they think going “paperless” will be too difficult. What many don’t realize is that all they need is a decent document scanner and some OCR scanning software. Larger organizations will often outsource their document scanning and digital storage needs as a way to get started, since these companies will eliminate the need to spend weeks in the office at the scanner. However, once the initial work is done, many offices choose to do the scanning themselves. A relatively inexpensive scanner will help you keep up with the influx of paper documents into your office, including letters, faxes, invoices and news articles. Using OCR scanning software in conjunction with the scanned images allows you to convert the PDFs into an editable, search able text format. Some companies choose to use the software that comes bundled with the scanner, which works well for controlling image quality, but does nothing to make the images search able. You will need a powerful OCR scanning software package with an intuitive user-interface. The best software will recognize different languages and fonts, read the text from screen-shots, and even extract text from a scanned document containing tables and pictures with ease. After your documents are all converted into digital formats, you will want to decide on an easy way to store and archive them on a secure server, or store them on an external hard drive. An easy way to index your search able scanned images is by using Google Desktop or the built-in search index tool on Windows Vista. Once you get the hang of it, you will wonder how you ever managed your documents any other way.