Document Scanning Services for Health Records to Ensure Long Term Preservation
Managed Outsource Solutions 8596 E. 101st Street, Suite H Tulsa, OK 74133 (800) 670 2809 ]
Document scanning services help digitize health records and thereby get rid of the clutter of paper documents in healthcare units.
How important is document scanning services in the present business scenario? This is the digital age of big data and cloud computing, but most enterprises still have stacks of paper documents holding important data. Business leaders and employees often have a negative view of paper-based processes, considering paper as a hindrance to productivity. This needn’t be so. You can intelligently manage your paper documents to increase productivity, improve customer relations management and data analytics processes. Take the example of the healthcare sector, where almost 80% of medical data is unstructured, meaning inbound information that cannot be easily organized and managed. Whether structured or unstructured, business data must be efficiently streamlined and managed. Physical documents must be dealt with appropriately right from the beginning so that information management problems arising from paper can be avoided. Significance of Healthcare Records
Health records constitute a systematized way of storing important healthcare details of the patients with the objective of easy accessibility at the time of treatment.
They contain personal data, details regarding diseases, modes of diagnosis, recommendations etc that help physicians to provide better care to the patients.
They enable patients to receive the right treatment. Moreover, they also serve as legal documents in instances such as fraud and medical malpractice.
Health records are very important from the point of view of the treatment and care of patients. Healthcare providers are required to retain these records for a specific period of time. Policies for retaining the records are primarily set by the states, though the federal government has set minimum periods for certain types of information and certain classes of patients. Most state authorities allow many types of health data to be destroyed after some period approximately within 10 years. However, most healthcare organizations retain these records for a longer period than required, and the important thing to ensure is that they are safely stored, and are easily accessible and searchable. Many organizations are digitizing health records for better management of medical documents. Government, public, technophiliac organizations like the American Medical Information Association (AMIA) are providing incentives and funds to encourage digitization of health records. Thus the digitization of health records and importance of health information technology has increased drastically.
www.managedoutsource.com
(800) 670 2809
Maintaining Old Medical Records Although many hospitals provide better patient care with digital health records, access to old health information is still difficult. When visiting a physician, he/ she may need past health details of the patient in addition to current health information for better diagnosis and treatment. Old healthcare documents are also imperative from the point of view of patient care. Hence digitization of old medical records is also necessary. Improving Workflow Processes with Document Scanning All hard copy documents must be efficiently scanned to ensure intelligent document capture, which is essential for improving the organization’s workflow processes.
If investing in an in-house scanner, you need to consider important factors such as paper size, scanning speed, paper jam detection, quality capturing of data and image.
Alternately you can consider partnering with a good document scanning and conversion company, in which case you needn’t have concerns regarding investing in scanners and scanning professionals.
The digitized documents must be fully searchable, and at this stage OCR (optical character recognition) technology is important to enable the digitized content to be recognizable to human users as well as artificial intelligence (AI). With this technology, your workflow processes can be streamlined, and the information can be accessed by multiple users in the enterprise.
With medical document scanning services, health information can be stored, distributed, migrated, replicated, retrieved or accessed quickly. Undoubtedly, digitization and preservation of health records is essential for improving the efficiency of health industry. How Long the Documents Should Be Kept Storing medical information is essential but how long to store depends upon the intended use of the health information. Some health documents may be stored for few years but some other documents may require life time storage. In some cases storage of medical documents even after the death of the patient may continue to have value for patient care.
A period between a century and eternity is the ideal option for storing
medical documents. Storing and archiving of such huge volumes of data requires adequate storage facilities and it should be separately stored from the records maintained for quotidian care.
www.managedoutsource.com
(800) 670 2809
Document scanning services help digitize health records and thereby get rid of the clutter of paper documents in healthcare units. It also saves your money and ensures security of your documents. With the help of a reputable document scanning company huge volumes of data can be digitized with excellent accuracy and speed. You also get to enjoy customized services at affordable rates.
www.managedoutsource.com
(800) 670 2809