Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Scanning after go-live

You still collect information that can’t be generated or collected electronically that is scanned into the EHR outside the preloading process. For example, your practice may have photocopies of insurance cards that you’ll need to scan. Patient registration and patient history information is largely captured via paper and then scanned. You may also need to scan reports or results that patients bring with them from another physician office or hospital. The number of practices implementing electronic kiosks, digital pen systems, and various data recognition technologies are limited at this time, but increasing. Until then, plan to scan some paper.

If you’re interested in reducing the amount of patient intake documents you’re scanning, ask your EHR or scanning vendor whether it supports the following data recognition technologies:

Optical Mark Recognition (OMR): Reads optical marks (such as check marks) on a form, which could assist in capturing patient histories.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Reads machine-written characters and letters, which could help determine paper document types and automatically match scanned documents with a patient’s record and encounter.

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR): Reads written information, which could assist in collecting patient registration and history information.

Figure 9-1 shows how an OCR/ICR process works.

Figure 9-1: Use an OCR/ICR system to get patient info into your EHR.

Consult reports, lab results, ...