Hospitals and clinics have generated an immense amount of paperwork for decades. However, with time, it has become difficult to manage them traditionally. Healthcare workers have to face numerous limitations, such as tedious organization, the vulnerability of paper to environmental conditions, human errors, lost records, and much more. This negatively impacts their overall productivity, reduces patient care quality, and even carries a risk of litigation.
However, scanning and digitizing medical documents presents an economical, safe, and easy way to manage paper records. You can go paperless, allowing you to quickly access patient records, share patient information with other institutions, and maintain the necessary confidentiality.
You can scan your medical records using any reputed document scanning software. For instance, TWAIN document scanners are the most beneficial because of their better compatibility with scanners and customizability.
But before we dive deeper into medical document scanning, let's look at the risks of using paper-based medical documentation:
Considerable Maintenance Costs
Traditional paper usage for administrative, and patient care management is inefficient and costly. It carries unnecessary financial overhead since procuring and managing paper documents is quite expensive. Employees often spend a considerable amount of time filing, completing, and organizing paper documents.
Moreover, storing paper documents takes up quite a chunk of office space. You often have to dedicate large spaces to filing cabinets, cupboards, etc. for storing paper documents.
Human Error
Paper documents can be easily inserted into the wrong file or folder, misfiled, or even lost. The worst-case scenario is that it can lead to exposure of PHI (Protected Health Information) or errors in patient treatment. Scanning medical records using document scanning software allows you to digitize them. You can then properly organize them digitally and minimize human error.
Compliance Adherence
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was created to protect sensitive patient health information. It outlines guidelines for patient information privacy and security standards.
All healthcare providers must follow them or risk severe legal implications. However, paper documents can be easily stolen, forged, or destroyed. This makes following HIPAA difficult, with any subsequent violation leading to tremendous financial liabilities.
Reduced Care Quality
Paper-dependent record maintenance has hidden risks to the patient's health. What if the attending clinician or doctor misplaces or loses the patient's medical documents? Or if they cannot be found during an emergency? This ultimately affects the quality of your care and may tarnish your reputation.
Digitizing medical information with document scanning software helps with easy retrieval and correct organization. Doctors can even access digital information on the go and rapidly act during emergencies.
Irreversible Data Loss
Paper is innately vulnerable to adverse environmental conditions. It can be irreversibly damaged, or it can also be easily misplaced. This risks healthcare organizations losing patient data or facing legal implications due to violating HIPAA compliance.
However, digital copies can be managed across multiple systems compared to their paper counterparts. So even if one of them is destroyed, the other can still be easily retrieved.
Why Use Medical Document Scanning?
Medical document scanning removes the paper element of your records and its associated risks. It ensures your patients' medical documents are protected, neatly organized, and can be accessed without any delays.
Here are the benefits of medical document scanning in a nutshell:
Simpler access and quicker retrieval of patient documents
- Accurate storage allows other healthcare providers to access and provide precise medical treatment.
- A quick search eliminates hours of document searching and retrieval.
- Unlimited, scalable storage with an encrypted data storage system
- Minimized the physical space needed to store documentation, allowing more room for patient care.
- Hierarchical-based data access reduces the risk of breaching patient privacy.
- Seamless access and sharing of patient records with other healthcare facilities
- Productive workflow management and enhanced efficiency
- Reliable disaster recovery
Steps to Medical Document Scanning
Now you must have realized the immense benefits of medical document scanning. Let's move forward with how you can implement it.
Planning The Scanning
You must first decide how to implement a document scanning system. Initially, there will be loads of documents to be scanned and digitized. So, will you delegate your employees to carry out the scanning or hire professional help to start the process?
Doing it yourself is comparatively economical, but make sure your employees are sufficiently trained. Otherwise, they may cause a mix-up in digitized documents and complicate things.
For instance, TWAIN document scanners are preferred by users these days (as mentioned above), which you can use to scan and digitize your documents. However, you need to do your own research or hire professionals to help you strategize.
Preparing and Organizing Documents for Scanning
This step is labor-intensive. You have to organize and prepare all the documents that must be scanned. Ensure that each patient's file has all their medical history information, including X-rays, CT scans, MRI reports, etc.
Avoid missing any document, or it can leave gaps in the patient's history. For better scanning workflow, start with the active patients and end with the deceased and inactive patients.
Scanning and Storage
You must use quality document scanning software with image editing features. It will ensure you have high-resolution images of the records with rapid scanning speed.
Securing your database
Digitized data is also at risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. You must use document scanning software from a reputed provider that offers data security features and protects against unauthorized data access.
Conclusion
Scanning medical documents helps you mitigate different paper-related limitations. You get a paperless document filing system that is more dynamic and productive. Any document can be found easily, allowing healthcare workers to focus on better patient care. Better security and compliance adherence are other benefits from medical document scanning.
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