It is not very often that one single technology can reduce expenses, decrease time patients spend in medical care facilities and save time for the medical care professionals.
Digitizing of medical records does all that. Paper documents are converted to electronic images and can be called up instantly. They do not require expensive storage space, they speed-up patient care and reduce administrative costs incurred for records management and retrieval.
A qualified document scanning service provider has the capability to scan and index large volumes of documents very quickly and can hence get you to your benefits (storage space savings, labor cost savings, faster patient care, reduction of administrative costs) almost immediately. A scanning service provider would also be able to insure necessary HIPAA compliance measures during the conversion process.
An in-house conversion process tends to be “fill-in” work which detracts from daily activities in a medical care office. Very often offices are not equipped with high speed scanners so the task of scanning and indexing records becomes very labor intensive. The task of indexing the records also does not have built in quality control checks which lead to higher potential for errors. What may be thought of as a less expensive option becomes a more expensive alternative. Whereas a document scanning service provider may digitize all 5000 patient files and provide you with a document management and retrieval solution in a few weeks, such a scanning task could go on for a year when done as a “fill-in” task by internal staff.
Scanning patient charts using a document scanning service provider such as ARDEM almost always gets you the results faster, with more accuracy and a lower total cost outlay.