Dublin-based bureau and BPO (Business Process Outsourcer) DataScan wanted to upscale its medical records scanning service for the Irish healthcare market.

To provide a fast, flexible and cost effective outsourced medical record scanning service for the Irish healthcare market, the company purchased seven mid-volume production Kodak i4200 Plus Scanners (part of the production scanner family) and installed File Stream electronic document management software (EDMS).

The new infrastructure will enable DataScan to rapidly grow its healthcare business in 2015 servicing hospital consultants and general practitioners (GPs). Supplied by Filestream reseller partner, Woodsoft, total investment in scanning hardware, software and support total €150,000.

EMR and medical record scanning to enhance better clinical collaboration, improve care and increase efficiency

Electronic medical records (EMR) solutions promote better clinical collaboration and ultimately provide a way to solve the tough challenge of improving the quality of patient care, enhancing operational productivity while reducing cost. Unlike EMR scanning projects in the UK which have been primarily funded and managed by NHS trusts, in Ireland it has been individual hospital consultants and GPs themselves who have initiated and paid for EMR projects for the patients they treat.

With around 10,000 patient files scanned per week, DataScan is seeing considerable interest in its medical records scanning services and today has around 70 healthcare customers. This includes consultants who work at St Vincent’s University Hospital, Bon Secours Hospital Dublin and clinicians operating from various medical clinics such as Blackrock, Beacon and Hermitage.

Orla Cafferty, DataScan’s director, explains, “Our goal is to double our healthcare business by the end of the year. With no click charges, Filestream’s EDMS is hugely flexible and we can output scanned medical records to our secure private cloud or in numerous file formats like XML and CSV depending on the practice management software (PMS) used without time consuming and expensive bespoke software customization work. This makes tendering accurate, keeps costs down, and our service price competitive.” Once records are scanned and indexed into File Stream, data can easily be imported into all the main PMS packages used by clinicians in Ireland such as Socrates Healthcare, Helix Healthcare, Odysseus and iMedDoc among others.

Medical recording challenges: messy patient files containing lots of different document and paper types

Barry Woods, managing director, Woodsoft, explains, “High volume scanners are perfect for processing documents like invoices which are very standardised. You load them up, press scan and walk away. But patient files are messy typically containing lots of different document and paper types which means considerable preparatory work required such that you wouldn’t get the efficiencies from using high volume equipment. To address this, we’ve installed a mid volume Kodak i4200 Plus Scanner per workstation so individual members of DataScan’s staff can work on specific projects and prepare documents as they go along.”

DataScan is also using Filestream’s advanced OCR module to do forms processing with various OCR templates set up to process legacy records and new correspondence. Cafferty says, “As new customers come on board, we can easily set up new OCR templates given the flexibility of the software. It means we can turnaround medical records scanning within tight service level agreements with the software doing the heavy processing work efficiently and accurately.”

In addition, given the price/performance of each Kodak i4200 Plus Scanner, DataScan can now cost effectively add new devices in the scanning bureau as business needs dictate.