Why & How Medical Document Scanning Can Save You a Bunch of Time
The importance of digitizing medical records cannot be underestimated in healthcare. It serves a valuable purpose for streamlined information administration and contributes to more efficient data management.
Medical records scanning helps streamline operations by doing away with time-consuming, paper-based, and manual processes. If you work with a trustworthy service to scan documents, you can rest assured that your digitization process will go off without a hitch and won’t break the bank.
Why Are Medical Records Scanning Important?
By scanning, we can transform paper documents into digital files. Once the scan is complete, a digital image of the document is created. It can be viewed, modified, shared, and printed.
There are several reasons why scanning medical documents is crucial. For one, it can help improve the overall efficiency of a healthcare facility and ensure compliance with HIPAA rules. As HIPAA requires, medical facilities must safeguard patients’ protected health information (PHI) by scanning and storing it electronically.
There is a legal mandate dictating how long medical facilities must preserve patient files. With the documents stored digitally, getting your hands on them is a breeze. It also ensures that they may be readily located and restored if a medical facility experiences file loss. Medical professionals can easily exchange and access patient records by scanning and sending them digital copies when appropriate.
How does Medical Records Scanning help Save Time?
Now that you understand the importance of medical records scanning, let’s look at how it can help you streamline operations to make them more efficient. Here’s how medical record scanning helps save time in a healthcare facility.
Improved Access to Documents
Clinical files for individual patients are exceptionally convoluted, with their thickness increasing with each new visit and citation. It’s common for doctors to have hundreds of patients under their care at once. The process of manually retrieving each patient’s record is time-consuming and inconvenient. In addition, it is labor-intensive, as one must work hard to arrange the file documents per the standards of medical practice.
The only obvious way to solve this problem is to digitize patient records. You can easily locate your desired file in a database with thousands of records in seconds. The digitization of medical records frees up valuable time that would otherwise be spent handling sensitive medical documents.
Reduced Chance of Error
Furthermore, administrative expenses and wasted time are greatly reduced by using digital medical records. Assistance and record-keeping staff are always needed in every medical setting, whether it be a huge hospital, a tiny clinic, or a solo practitioner. Scanning all medical records, however, not only reduces the number of employees needed but also significantly reduces the amount of time spent on the process.
Digital patient records eliminate the need for assistants’ reliance on their memories in this process. Errors and misplacements are far less likely to occur here. It is important to emphasize that human error can have dire consequences in healthcare. So, investing in digitizing your medical records is a wise decision.
Mobile Access
Digitized medical records are easily accessible by doctors and hospital administrators via portable devices. Because all patient information is stored safely in one central location, doctors no longer need to bring clipboards along on rounds. It is easy for doctors to look up patient records, check insurance, and analyze data with mobile access. It also saves a lot of back-and-forth between different departments.
Ease of Records Manipulation
In many cases, patients see multiple doctors at once. In this situation, the patient’s medical records are revised and updated by several practitioners. A lack of standardized digital files can make it difficult for a new doctor to get started on a case when a patient is concluding consultation with one practitioner and wants to consult another.
Records in print are cumbersome to update, whereas digital records may be changed quickly and easily. Generally, older versions are discarded because it is still possible to confuse them with newer ones. Hence, it’s best to throw them away even if you update them. However, if the record is digital, updates may be made more quickly, and older copies of documents can be kept alongside the most recent for easy access.
The decision to digitize medical data for professionals is a long-term investment that will increase efficiency, safety, and convenience.
Go Digital with Smooth Solutions
Healthcare organizations may scan medical records in-house, but proper scanning policies, procedures, and implementation workflow must be developed to streamline in-house medical records scanning. Furthermore, staff members must have sufficient time set aside for training on these policies, strategies, processes, and of course, scanning.
On the other hand, working with a professional service to scan documents can boost efficiency. If you are looking for cost-effective medical records scanning, consider Smooth Solutions. With over 25 years of experience in the document imaging industry, Smooth Solutions has digitized over a billion pages and have thousands of happy clients.
High-security, cutting-edge infrastructure for scanning documents allows Smooth Solutions Experts to efficiently and properly scan massive amounts of paper and archived documents. Documents are indexed and OCRed precisely so you can find them quickly and easily. Visit Smooth Solutions for more information or a quote.
