A medical institute or practicing clinic takes in countless paperwork daily which can become a challenge if you have no efficient document management and conversion mechanism to manage sensitive documents. Manual document management is prone to misplacement and errors. Therefore, to avoid these problems a professional medical record scanning service is an absolute necessity. Medical Record Scanning is a process of converting physical paper documents into digital images. Medical institutions must take precautionary measures to implement the digitization of medical records via outsourcing document scanning companies. In this way, patient data is kept safe and secure complying with HIPAA regulations.

 

In today’s digital era, it is vital to process medical records using in-built systems to accurately scan medical records. Not only do you get well-scanned data records but these records are streamlined with your office operations as well. Hence, a professional medical record service help improves the quality of your patient services alongside managing data records and files.

 

Risks of Holding Paper-based Medical Records

 

Medical records stored in physical paper format undergo a higher risk of compliance-related issues because the protection of paper-based documents is a universal challenge. Paper can be easily torn, burnt, lost, and misplaced which can incur huge data loss for your business. It also uplifts the chances of medical records and files being misplaced or mishandled. Medical records hold patients’ personal information, treatment cost, and other critical data that may fall into the hands of criminals for illegal purposes. Due to the enormous amount of data storage and non-stop dealing with new data, data breaches have increased in the healthcare sector. The US healthcare sector has overall the 4^th highest number of data breaches among other industrial sectors. The risk factor attached to paper medical records has made it difficult for physicians to access information during emergencies which may adversely affect the patient health. Due to all these challenges, it is best to scan medical records using automated solutions and store data in a digitally secure database.

 

Need for Medical Record Scanning

 

Easy Accessibility

 

When you intend to save patient data on paper you invite many problems for example it becomes difficult to update new records of active & inactive patients and discard misfiled reports. An expert medical record scanning service will help you deal with more and more data by saving up space. Such information can be accessed quickly and you can access all these digital documents into an effective EMR system.

 

Better Security of Medical Data

 

Data is the absolute backbone of a company without relevant data your company can not function for a day thus it must be protected at all costs. In medical institutes, patient data constitutes the overall data reservoir therefore using EMR will give your company the much-needed boost and increase its efficiency by many folds. There are fewer chances of error to occur in digital data formats as the information is scanned and processed using automated programs.

 

Efficient Management of The Records

 

A greater number of healthcare organizations struggle with a potential backlog of medical records. Outsource medical record scanning to a trustworthy service provider and get resolved all your healthcare documentation issues with suitable solutions at hand. Indexing and scanning medical record data are better options for effectively streamlining mass documents within minimum time.

 

Improves Patient-Provider Relationship

 

The use of electronic medical record systems promotes your institute’s relationship with your patients, staff members, and existing physicians. Presentation of paper documents into electronic formats like medical bills, summaries, charts, notes, patient files, and so on, can greatly improve your in-house team collaboration and staff-patient communication.

 

How to Scan Your Medical Records

 

Once you are aware of the importance of maintaining digital medical records now let us come down to the main part i.e. how to scan all your medical files and convert them into any digital format. You can easily scan medical records using the two prescribed methods described below –

 

Scan All Data By Yourself

 

The first method is to perform data conversion all by yourself this practice proves to be both easy and economical. Healthcare professionals must analyze whether their workers have expert training to scan and index medical records or not. The side-effects of data breaches, misplaced files, inaccurately indexed documents, or low-quality scans are too high to ignore. However, mitigating these effects after the damage is done proves too expensive. If you lack confidence in your employee’s capabilities then in such cases hiring professional data administrators proves to be a safer option.

 

Outsource To Scanning Services

 

Hiring renowned and experienced document conversion services is a much more reliable and faster way to digitize your medical records. A HIPAA-Compliant medical records scanning firm with years of experience can rightfully help institutes to digitize patient medical records and upload them into the EMR system safely.

 

More On Scanning The Medical Records

 

Scan All Patient Records into The EMR

 

Digitization is a perfect solution if your firm is running out of space to store more information. The scanning workflow can be conducted by any staff member but it is better to hire exceptionally skilled individuals with relevant filing experience in scanned records into the files of patients.

 

Partial Scanning of Medical Records

 

To ensure that every appointment is scheduled accurately you can also perform a partial scan. You can scan only the clinical information which is provided for future appointments. Physicians can make sure which information is correct, including initial exam, patient meetings, previous medical history, and lab results. This will allow the physician to easily scan relevant patient records and upload them to the EMR system whenever the patient comes for the next appointment.

 

Scanning of Patients’ Summary Page into The EMR

 

Maintaining a project summary is very useful when you encounter an overflow of patients on regular basis in your clinic. More patients’ data will be recorded in an electronic format and will be updated accordingly. When you file a patient record you can add extra information as well.

 

Exclude Old Information From The EMR System

 

It is best to scan previous data and upload it to your EMR system. This will assist you in keeping notice of improvements or any changes by consulting old patient records. After some time you might as well not need to consult any records anymore. The goal is to lessen the workload spent on scanning loads of paper documents. Scanning only relevant information will allow you to maintain all medical records and keep them secure from external or internal damage.

 

Conclusion –

 

Medical record scanning smoothes clinical documentation procedures by reducing chances of data duplications, enabling retrieval of lost data, maximizing data efficiency, and enriching intelligence capabilities such as medical prescription alerts and treatment soft reminders to provide high-quality medical treatments. Data can be customized in your desired digital formats for favoring certain special medical specialties. If you are interested in ITS Scanning/OCR/Clean-Up Services, you can ask for a free quote!