Ability to scan paper forms directly into EMR
We've heard that modern hospitals have patients fill out paper forms and then they just scan them directly into the EMR systems and the OCR software can recognize all the handwriting so the admin does not have to manually type in anything other than double check that the OCR software recognized all the characters correctly. Do you know any more about this? Would Jasmine support this?
AdminMinto Tsai
(Founder, Jasmine Software)
shared this idea
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Victor Lin commented
In addition, this will aid people who are currently in the process of converting from a paper system to an electronic one. There will be lots of paper patient files that need to be converted to electronic. Obviously not the entire list of patients from the inception of the business, but maybe clients from the last 3 months.
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Victor Lin
commented
Hi all! I was the one who suggested this idea. This serves a number of uses:
1. It saves a lot of time. If you don't have an admin, you have to manually enter in what the patient filled out in their paper form. This would require a lot of time and you'll be hoping that the patient's handwriting is legible.
2. People who are not good with typing or reading English will find this particularly burdensome.
3. If you DO have an admin, an admin has much better things to do than brainlessly copying and doing data entry.
4. It can cut down on data entry errors. The system would recognize the handwriting and you just have to quickly do a visual once-over to make sure it recognized everything correctly.
Now, this suggestion is valid ONLY if patients, for some reason, *have* to fill out a paper form. If there is a way for them to just fill out the form electronically, such as on a laptop or little touchscreen kiosk in the office, then we would much rather implement this than do some kind of fallible paper-scanning-OCR system.
I've also heard that some places have laws that say paper documents must be kept for 6 months or something for safe-keeping, after which they can be shredded? Can anyone shed some light on this?
This is in alignment with the "Enter Data Only Once" best-practices philosophy.