January 21, 2011

Electronic health record systems – or EHR as they’re commonly known – are a hot topic in hospitals and doctors’ offices around the country these days.  Many of these organizations are beginning to establish meaningful EHR systems within their practices, capitalizing on federal incentives in the process. But still those who have implemented complete EHR systems are few and far between.  Consider the latest stats from the medical industry trade association HIMSS: Less than half of 1 percent of all U.S. hospitals have a complete EHR system.

So, what’s the hold up?   What’s holding hospitals and medical practices from implementing something that seems so straight forward and beneficial to all involved?

Much of the problem may stem from the complexities involved in getting reams of paper documents from historical patient records into the EHR system.  As they are designed, EHR systems are primarily databases – not document management systems – which make it a challenge for those operating them to input paper or scanned documents and ensure the right data is being captured.

Typically medical office or hospital administrative staff doesn’t have the level of document management expertise that may be needed to ensure proper entry of scanned paper records into the EHR system. They’ll need to make sure that the patient for each document can be easily identified, that color capture is done so that they can read hand-written notes on the scanned document, and they’ll need to make sure that documents are adequately compressed so the electronic files don’t burden their digital storage space and are easy to transfer via email for collaboration purposes.

What can make the process easier for the medical staff is finding a partner with document management expertise and establishing a process that will meet their unique needs for capturing paper-based and born digital medical records for the EHR system.  This process can be the development of what’s called a “production environment,” much like we’re doing here at LuraTech with DocYard, that helps simplify the workflow and ensures that all types of paper and electronic records can be easily integrated into an EHR system.  DocYard can also include a module for conversion to PDF/A that will ensure long-term accessibility and preservation of documents.

If you’re interested in learning about how to find an effective document management solution, and the simple steps it takes to build a customized production environment for the healthcare industry, please give me a call or email me at m.mckinney(at)luratech.com.  I’d also encourage you to take a look at an article I wrote last October for ADVANCE for Health Information Professionals magazine called “The Prescription for EHRs: Consider These Five Tips for Integrating Paper and Digital Documents into the EHR”.  The article offers some helpful hints that may be useful for medical professionals embarking on the launch of an EHR system.

October 19, 1010

If you’re a scan service provider, you know that the business these days is defined by stiff competition and increasingly slimmer margins.  A fraction of a cent can mean the difference in winning a big job and being a perpetual runner-up.  That fraction of a cent also could be the difference between making money on a project and barely making ends meet.

The eternal question is:  How can I win in a competitive bidding war and still make a profit?

To answer that question, you need to be able to glean insight into the processes you’ll be using for a job, the efficiency of the people you employ and the technical steps required. But doing so can be very difficult for scan service providers that use disparate systems with no centralized management capabilities, and often find themselves dealing with errors or ineffective processes once that new job begins.

With a centrally managed platform that can control and monitor workflows, our DocYard solution can provide the management data scan service providers need to accurately estimate their internal costs for processing jobs, and what components will be needed to successfully do so.  And once a job has been won, DocYard can help you quickly build conversion workflows, improve efficiency by minimizing errors, and reduce processing costs.

With more and better data as a result of using DocYard, you can gain a competitive edge in the scan service market.

October 10, 2010

If you’re a company that has to manage millions of pages of scanned paper and digital documents, you probably always have an uneasy feeling about whether your document conversion process is running as smoothly as it could.

For most companies, there hasn’t been a real, practical way to make sure that the automated processes are running as smoothly as possible without errors, nor can you track your employees’ progress to ensure they are being efficient or need more training. The reason, the various pieces in the conversion process were disparate or too complex, resulting in a lack of oversight and control.  Therefore, any step in the process could be the weakest link that diminishes your already-slim margins or introduces time-consuming mistakes into the conversion job.

With our DocYard platform, we’re hoping to give scan service providers and other companies dealing with massive amounts of documents the muscle to overcome those weak links.  DocYard is a production level document conversion environment that can give you a view into the process. And through its centralized management capabilities, lets you have a clear picture of where your workflow could use improvement. 

Question:
LuraTech's new DocYard product is an integration platform - how does
my scan service bureau benefit from such a product?

Answer:
DocYard focuses on production-level document conversion
workflows. And this platform really focuses on integration - you
can keep existing tools and integrate them into DocYard in the shape
of DocYard Modules. In particular, this means that you do not have to
unleash a huge migration project, plan an enterprise-wide rollout
top-down and then turn your whole organization inside out.

Instead you can start small, implementing one workflow or even a part
of one workflow and then expand over time in a stepwise
approach. Still, you immediately benefit from DocYard's unified
management and reporting and its parallel processing support. Plus
you can avoid unecessary manual or script-based copying of files
- the DocYard infrastructure moves the data around for you.

Finally, DocYard offers menas of integrating manual processes with
automated ones. This lets you seamlessly combine e.g. manual indexing
or QC tasks with fully automated processes, such as compression or OCR.