Digitizing Medical Health Records
It is not very often that one single technology can reduce expenses, decrease
time patients spend in
medical care facilities and save time for the medical care professionals.
Imaging of medical records does all that. Paper documents are converted to
electronic images and can
be called up instantly. They do not require expensive storage space, they speed-up
patient care and
reduce administrative costs incurred for records management and retrieval.
Many medical care providers struggle with the question - should we go paperless
and scan these
records internally or should we outsource to a service provider.
A qualified service provider has the capability to scan and index large volumes
of documents very quickly
and can hence get you to your benefits (storage space savings, labor cost
savings, faster patient care,
reduction of administrative costs) almost immediately. A service provider
would also be able to insure
necessary HIPPAA compliance measures during the conversion process.
An in-house conversion process tends to be "fill-in" work which
detracts from daily activities in a medical
care office. Very often offices are not equipped with high speed scanners so
the task of scanning and
indexing records becomes very labor intensive. The task of indexing the records
also does not have built
in quality control checks which leads to higher potential for errors. What
maybe thought of as a less
expensive option becomes a more expensive alternative. Where as a service provider
may image all
5000 patient files and provide you with a document management and retrieval
solution in a few weeks,
such a task could go on for a year when done as a "fill-in" task
by internal staff.
