Document Imaging ("Scanning")

(new topic)

References

Here is a link to a guide that is specific to my adjacent province of Alberta (in Canada) but a lot of it is generalizable: http://www.cpsa.ab.ca/publicationsresources/attachments_policies/Transition%20to%20Electronic%20Medical%20Records.pdf

Another bit at: http://www.advantageemr.com/advantage_emr_transition_brief.pdf

White paper from a tech consulting company: http://www.usercentric.com/publications/downloadable/usercentric-ehr-white-paper.pdf

and an Oscar EMR thread on scanning under Windows as well as Mac setups: oscarmcmaster-bc-users at sourceforge

… where the issues on the thread included:

• pre-import naming of files as "lastname_firstname_servicedate_providercode_typeofdocument.pdf" did not avoid file losses and was instead associated with misfiles (misnamed, hence into the wrong patient file) so it was instead suggested that documents be simply
  • auto-named e.g. by date
  • auto-incremented e.g. number (PaperPort Visioneer, and Apple's Image Capture, do this)
  • import into the EMR was done visually, where the selected document was previewable (ideally) without having to be opened
    • Windows' Adobe will only provide readably large thumbnails for image files, not for PDFs
    • Apple's Preview application was valued for its ability to drag and drop pages from a left "source" document-and-pane into an adjacent new "target" file
    • Debian, Ubuntu & other Linux: Gloobus
  • naming convention for the document within the EMR was
    • type-of-study_body-region
    • supplemented by whatever key word or two (Dx in a report) that the clinician had highlighted (e.g. osteoarthritis or subcapital fracture)
    • worked equally well with consults
    • highlighting is much faster than writing and yellow highlighter doesn't show up in the scanned document
• one practice found 150 dpi too degraded, so went with 300 DPI (others suggest 200 dpi)
  • 5 years of paper scans, plus another several years' worth of old prior hand-written chart data, all scanned to PDF at 300 DPI black & white, added up to just about 12 GB in their backup, or about 1 Gb per full-time doctor-equivalent-year of general practice (contributed by a doctor on an Oscar McMaster list, Jan 15 2010)
  • make sure you don't inadvertently scan in colour or at too high a resolution; an auto-straighten (de-skew) function, where it is available, may increase file sizes
  • some scanning softwares or add-ons can also optically-character recognize (at accuracies of 97% or greater) and thereby adding a layer of searchable text beneath the scanned image