Healthcare reform is on everyone's mind. Making Paper Easy is proud to present the second in a four-part series of articles addressing the benefits and challenges of making the vision of well-implemented digital patient record a reality.
The following is excerpted from Petra Beck's article, “Get a more complete picture of patient health.”
A long-term strategy for a perennial problem
Despite decades of predictions, the paperless office and clinic has yet to arrive. Notes, correspondence, instrument readouts, and forms from outside of your system will persist. This type of unstructured information is easy to manage with document imaging. When the time comes, you simply build associations between the incoming images and the databases in your EMR.
Imagine pulling together all of the paperwork involved in a patient’s care within a practice, within a hospital, or even within a health network. Instead of searching physical locations or waiting for fax or mail, all relevant documents can be retrieved in seconds for viewing. This type of consolidation can advance the care delivery goals of Chief Financial Officers and Chiefs of Surgery. The streamlining of clinical and administrative workflows will save time and trouble for providers, payers, and most of all, patients.
But the benefits of infoimaging extend beyond paperwork automation. Diagnostic imagery and data generated by digital information systems can be added to present the full dimension of a patient’s clinical history without delay. Many hospitals have started implementing small scale solutions in the radiology department or the patient record archive, which they are now expanding to enterprise-wide, fully integrated medical record systems.
Scan your way into the 21st Century.
The tools to capture, manage, archive, and deliver document images are robust and well understood. Document management and imaging workflows have long been best practices in a variety of document-centric industries. High-value documents such as mortgage and loan applications, health insurance claims, and mutual funds are all processed as document images scanned from paper documents. Who needs to handle, file, and store paper documents or transcribe content when you can capture the valuable information they contain digitally? If imaging works for invoice processing, check processing, and national census forms, surely the same principles can apply to healthcare documents.
Document imaging sidesteps many of the obstacles inherent in the development of a common EMR scheme. Images are stored in widely accepted standard formats, such as PDF and TIFF. Software already exists to help automate the entry of indexing keys. Encryption and digital rights management software can be used to control access and maintain privacy. Compared to paper records, backup and disaster recovery are easy. Missing files or out-of-file situations are eliminated, leading to better quality decision-making.
The endpoint of document imaging is an electronic patient record that combines all paper-based information with digital information produced by modalities and other patient information systems. A history of the observations, transactions, and treatments related to a given patient provided in a searchable database, complete with signatures, handwritten entries, and marginal notations. Staff can access these records through a browser or portal, even use customized search engines to collect information across patients for statistical analysis.
i/oTrak is committed to making paper easier. We are a Kodak Authorized Info & Photo Scanning Equipment Reseller and Document Conversion Center. We offer a range of back-office services to help businesses of all sizes with their document needs, including E-Z Scan, E-Z Store, E-Z Shred, and E-Z Send. For a complete copy of Petra Beck's article featured in this series, click here.
