The digital transformation of the healthcare sector has been a challenging process, but an increasing number of healthcare organizations are turning to modern tools to digitize their patient records and medical documents, many of which are sitting in archives in a basement or storage facility. The need to digitally transform patient records stems from not only today’s expectations of having data at your fingertips, but being able to create a holistic view of the patient to improve outcomes and quality of care.

The first step in this process is to use intelligent, or “smart” document capture software featuring  AI-based, supervised machine learning technology to classify, extract and export metadata into an EMR, EHR, ECM or other systems. Security and privacy of the data is of utmost concern for healthcare organizations, especially as it relates to compliance and data protection of patients. Now that modern technology is available, safeguarding medical data, with legislation like HIPAA in the United States, is pushing healthcare facilities to initiate digital transformation. Clinical documents, such as doctor’s notes, discharge summaries, lab results as well as digital images must all be considered for assessing a complete patient treatment.

For example, the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK and the largest single-payer healthcare system in the world, recently underwent the move to digitize their patient records and referral system to address the issues of having fast, comprehensive care for their patients. NHS described how their referral for services process was previously error-prone as most of them came in from fax or email and were printed before manually being processed. The delay in processing sometimes caused patient care to fail to meet the 18 weeks maximum requirement by law. Automating the process with smart technology enabled NHS to dramatically reduce errors and provide better, safer and faster care for their constituents.  

Are you ready to digitally transform your patient or healthcare documents?