Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Scanning the rest of the patient’s chart

You’ve identified key information, like problems, medications and allergies, that you’ll preload into the EHR. But you want access to more past information such as key consults or visit notes, and you don’t want to hand enter all that information, right? That’s where scanning information can really help. The clear advantage in scanning patient charts is that all data for a patient is available from the EHR, and patient charts can be subsequently removed from the practice for offsite storage. Scanning the entire record is very labor-intensive and can take a lot of electronic storage space. However, the cost of electronic storage options gets less expensive each day. The important consideration for scanning is what to scan and when.

Information scanned into the EHR isn’t structured or coded, so the EHR won’t generate alerts based on this scanned information — but the chart is available at your fingertips. Actually, it’s available at your fingertips if your scanning process includes manually entering descriptive information about each document and/or visit type and then associating the information with the patient in the EHR.

Some software solutions can generate barcode stickers with patient identification and document type information that you can affix to documents; you can then scan documents in batches and match this scanned info with the patient’s chart in the EHR. Your EHR vendor may also offer this service.

If you can determine chronic ...