| Scanning in Practice |
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| Written by Jennifer Flaten | ||||||||
| Monday, 23 March 2009 11:45 | ||||||||
You have selected the perfect electronic medical record system for you office. Soon it will be up and running. Now you are faced with the question of what you will do with all your paper files. It is huge task to convert your paper files to an electronic format. It is also a decision that you should give as much thought to as the decision to implement the electronic record system. Generally, the paper records are scanned and converted to PDF files, which then can be linked with the patient’s medical record or stored in an online archive. Depending on the size of your practice, you could be facing several thousand patient files, while not all of them are active; you still have to look through them to determine which files should be converted into electronic format. Whether you choose to do the conversion in house with your own staff or whether you choose to hire an outside firm, on thing is certain it must be done in a methodical manner. The original documents must retain their integrity and the scanning must be accurate. It does you no good to scan in a document and have it be an unreadable blur. Since the patient files contain sensitive patient information you must make sure that the scanning is done in a secure environment. A key component to a smooth conversion is to create a master list. This list details which key pieces of paperwork from the patients chart that you want converted. It varies from physician to physician. Many choose the two most recent exam sheets and any recent lab results. It is important that you identify what is documents are critical. Then you or members of your staff can go through the files and weed out the unnecessary paperwork. Once that is done, the files are ready for conversion. Whether you use an outside scanning service or whether you do it yourself, you are now ready to begin scanning. An outside scanning service offers little or no disruption to your office flow. While doing the scanning in house means allocating staff to do it. If you choose to do it in house, you must make sure a set time each day is given to scanning, otherwise the files will just back up. Then you will be faced with insurmountable pile of files to be scanned. | ||||||||
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About the Author: Jeff Merron is a full-time freelance editor, journalist, and copywriter who has written for the New York Times Magazine, ESPN.com, Slate, Byte Magazine, Macworld, Consumers Digest, and many other national publications. He's also a regular contributor to IT Business Insider and 108, a baseball magazine. He has a Ph.D. in Mass Communication Research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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