Friday, September 28, 2012

How Hospitals Can Rely On EHR Software To Scan And Preserve Paperwork

By Sylvia R. Chamberlin


Hospitals rely on EHR software to save digital versions of their patient records. This software can serve a wide variety of purposes and fill in many functions for the hospital. Digital records software helps the hospital go paperless, saves money and allows for easy transfer of patient records between departments. It's also an excellent way to store massive amounts of patient information. Employees at hospitals are even able to scan in old paperwork to store digitally in the database.

Audio, photos, and even video files can all be saved to patient records within the database. Old paperwork is scanned with traditional scanners to create the image files. At the workstation, hospital workers can save these files as JPEG, GIF or even PDF documents. It's also possible to install OCR recognition software to scan documents for use in a word processing document. This software is able to recognize different letters and words on a page and it can re-create them in some sort of word-processing file. WAV, MP3 or AVI format is required for the audio and video files uploaded to the database.

It's not hard at all to save paperwork in digital form using EHR programs. To start with, workers will scan the document into their computers using a standard printer/scanner. Once this step is completed, the workers are able to enter the electronic health record system to upload the document to a patient's file. The digital version of this paperwork is now available indefinitely through the cloud database.

A digital patient database supplies plenty to hospitals in the way of benefits. Hospitals are able to more closely follow the EHR Meaningful Use guidelines that were recently created in order to improve hospital efficiency and preserve patient health. Moving to a digital format allows hospitals to save additional money in paper and cuts down on waste. Plus, those digital patient files won't degrade over time. Using this software also helps make communication between doctors, nurses and other workers at the hospital almost instantaneous via handheld devices and pads.

These databases are capable of holding much more information than fillable forms. Electronic health record databases can even store audio and video files. Employees can also rapidly scan paperwork into the system using a traditional printer/scanner. There are many pluses to keeping a digital version of patient records such as, reducing paper waste, adhering to meaningful use policies and improving communication time.




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