February 8, 2011

A couple weeks ago, we talked about some of the hurdles that the healthcare industry was trying to jump as it moved to electronic health records (EHRs), in our blog about “Managing Documents in HER Systems .”  But as more and more hospitals and medical offices move to EHR systems, they need to consider more than just how they’ll get their paper documents into the electronic records.

One major decision is in which format these electronic records should be saved.  There are many formats in use today, but perhaps the best one for ensuring accessibility of patient records for the entire lifetime of the patient is PDF/A.

Most people are familiar with PDF – one of the most popular formats in use today for being able to read documents with various components, such as text, pictures, graphics and other content.  PDF/A is an update of the PDF standard designed for long-term archiving because it will be able to be accessed and viewed regardless of hardware or software used by offices in the future.

PDF/A can offer the medical industry a number of benefits:

• Available for the life of the patient – The standardization of PDF/A guarantees that documents saved in this format can be accessed long into the future, regardless of new or enhanced applications that may be developed and adopted.
• Reduced file size – Scanned medical records can be compressed to be 100 times smaller (black and white documents compress up to 10 times smaller) within PDF/A than other outdated and less dependable file formats. This will help minimize storage requirements and costs, while allowing medical offices and hospitals to save digital documents in both color and black-and-white. The smaller file sizes also support ease of access and sharing by email for medical consultations.
• Use of Color – Because of the compression capabilities of PDF/A, medical records don’t have to be scanned in just black and white.  Hospitals and medical offices can scan documents in full color – to show where doctors or nurses have highlighted specific information, or handwritten notes in different color ink.
• Searchability – PDF/A can include hidden text, indexing and metadata. As a result, PDF/A supports OCR and full-text searching in the documents – a feature not incorporated into other formats.
• Digital Signature – The PDF/A format also allows digital signatures, enabling users to electronically sign-off to verify that the electronic document is an accurate representation of the original.
• Vendor independence – Because it is an ISO standard platform, users of PDF/A do not need to purchase proprietary software or applications to share or view PDF/A-based documents.  With PDF/A, documents can be rendered reliably and consistently without regard to the hardware or software platform.

If you’re interested in more information about implementing EHRs in PDF/A format, please e-mail me at m.mckinney(at)luratech.com.