Sunday, September 16, 2012

EHR Software Allows Hospitals To Digitize Patient Forms

By Sylvia R. Chamberlin


Hospitals rely on EHR software to save digital versions of their patient records. Electronic health record software is capable of filling a number of services in a hospital. The software can help a hospital reduce paper waste, save money and even transfer patient information quickly and easily. It's surprising how much information can also be stored in a digital form. Hospitals can also scan paperwork from old patient files and other forms of information and store it in the database.

Health record software can be set up to store a large amount of document types, including audio, image and video files. JPEGs from scanned images and photos are easy to create. These can be stored as JPGs, GIFs or even PDF files. Hospitals can even use OCR recognition software to scan a document and convert it into a word document. Also referred to as, optical character recognition software, this program will analyze characters of text on a page and re-creates that in a word-processing document. Audio and video files can be recorded and saved as WAV, MP3 or AVI format.

Scanning forms into the EHR database is usually very straightforward. A standard computer scanner is installed to scan the paperwork and save it on the computer. Next, they login to the software database and find the patient's records and upload the file to the system. Once saved, the new information is now accessible from anywhere via the cloud.

Overall, there are several benefits to using this service for a digital patient database Creating digital versions of paperwork allows hospitals to more closely stick to EHR Meaningful Use policies that are intended to reduce filing errors that could potentially affect a patient's health. Moving to a digital format allows hospitals to save additional money in paper and cuts down on waste. Additionally, a digital file is available forever and won't degrade over time. Doctors and employees at the facility can also keep handheld devices to communicate this information almost instantly with one another.

These databases are equipped to hold much more information than patient forms. They can also be used to store video and audio files that are relevant to patient health. Plus, service providers of web-based electronic health record software make it cinch to scan in paperwork and upload it to the system. Cutting down on paper waste, following meaningful use policies and improving worker efficiency are all benefits of using web-based software.




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