HealthCare remains a paper-intensive and minimally automated and digitized industry. CBS Market watch reported that an estimated 90% of all patient information remains on paper. Widespread efforts are currently in process to scan paper records into electronic format.

Inherent problems associated with paper-based patient records include:

  • A sizeable amount of money associated with healthcare is spent for administrative costs. The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 31 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent on administrative costs.
  • Paper-based files are often lost or misfiled. As a result, physicians see patients an estimated 40% of the time without a completed chart.
  • Physicians and staff spend a tremendous amount of time maintaining paper-based patient records.
  • To remain competitive, HealthCare providers are looking for technology that can help them to improve overall healthcare, improve the accuracy of diagnosis, and expedite transaction processing.
  • If the Health Care Quality Modernization, Cost Reduction and Quality Improvement Act is approved, it will mandate that all U.S. patient records be in an electronic format by 2011.
  • Worldwide the healthcare industry is looking for technology that can establish on-line clinical repositories to enable rapid access to shared information that can help find cures for prevalent medical conditions.

To read the entire whitepaper about how these issues are being addressed by scanning, go to the HealthCare Document Imaging Trend Report.