Meaningful Use of EHR Documents in Hospitals

Utilizing electronic health records effectively has become critical for more than cooperation with standard compliance laws.  With the ability to improve patient care as well as reduce costs in document-driven processes, meaningful use of EHR systems is something every healthcare provider should strive for. From self-dispensing medicine to seamless hospital transfers, automation is all around. In the case of electronic health records, applying automated file compression and OCR processing can ensure even faster, streamlined care.

Improving Patient Care with File Compression and OCR for EHR

Medical centers face thousands, perhaps millions of documents per year ranging from patient records to bills, insurance documentation, and more. When scanning documents, it’s easy for information to get lost without some sort of standardized system in place to make everything organized and more accessible.

As discussed in our previous posts File Compression: Meaningful Use of EHR in Hospitals and OCR: Meaningful Use of EHR systems in Hospitals, the transition from paper to EHRs enables hospitals for better patient care, reduced wait times, and greater efficiency when used strategically. File compression has allowed for medical staff to retrieve records faster, improving patient treatment rates. Similarly, OCR has enabled staff to search keywords and find the health records or insurance documents they are looking for in a moment’s notice. All of these advances in technology are not only facilitating faster patient care but also improving quality of care.

Using Watched Folders for Cost and Staff Efficiency

Applying compression and OCR with watched folders is a way to ensure files are being processed without manual intervention. With watched folders or “hot folders,” the software automatically begins processing documents as they enter a specified folder. This allows staff to take care of more important tasks while relying on their system to automatically create compressed, text-searchable documents.

With this automated process in place, hospitals and healthcare providers ensure that their documents are faster and easier to email, download, store, and manage. On an organizational level, having this degree of automation in place ensures medical staff will spend less time waiting for EHR records to download or searching for a specific patient’s file in an otherwise unorganized database. With watched folders in place, healthcare providers can realize front-end and back-end improvements, including increases in patient visit efficiency and reductions in network and document storage requirements.

Download a trial of PdfCompressor, equipped with the ability to OCR and compress documents in watched folder mode, to experience how your organization can leverage automated EHR processing to drive more efficient patient care.