Nuance Extends eCopy ShareScan to Automate the Conversion of Paper into Electronic Medical Records

A few days ago, we published a Service Point Solutions press release that talked about Service Point’s Dutch subsidiary expanding its business to include scanning/digitizing medical records. Last night, we came across a press release from Nuance; Nuance’s press release talks about its software that automates the conversion of paper into electronic medical records.

Press Release

Nuance Extends eCopy ShareScan to Automate the Conversion of Paper into Electronic Medical Records

02/21/2012

LAS VEGAS – Nuance Communications, announced that Nuance eCopy ShareScan will be a part of the Health Story Project’s Use Case at the HIMSS 2012 Interoperability Showcase. Nuance is demonstrating eCopy ShareScan’s capability to automatically convert unstructured, paper documents to HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) files that can be distributed into electronic health records (EHRs).

eCopy ShareScan is the world’s best-selling document scanning and workflow solution for networked multifunction printers (MFPs.) The solution simplifies and streamlines the scanning of paper documents, adding touch-screen scanning to networked scanning devices and providing hospitals and clinics with the ability to implement secure paper-to-digital workflows that can be distributed throughout the organization using existing investments in scanners and MFPs. The software works with MFPs from the world’s leading vendors - including Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Océ, Ricoh, Toshiba and Xerox.

“With the increasing migration to EMRs and EHRs, the demand for scanning medical information into digital workflows and for archiving is high and still growing. A critical need going forward is the mining of both structured and unstructured medical data for better health outcomes and cost reduction,” said Angele Boyd, IDC GVP/GM, Imaging/Output Document Solutions.

A 2011 study of forty physicians’ practices commissioned by Nuance showed that while 80 percent of practices have implemented an electronic health record system, all forty practices continue to generate, receive and manage paper records. Furthermore, of the one half of surveyed practices that were scanning documents, most are dissatisfied with their current scanning process citing the cost of labor, time lapses from receipt to online access and accessibility to scanned information in their EHRs as their major complaints.

“Paper documents remain pervasive in healthcare workflows, particularly in the sharing of information between providers, and cause barriers to meeting Meaningful Use criteria in the adoption of electronic medical record systems,” said Robert Weideman, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Document Imaging. “By empowering any healthcare worker to use any scanner or MFP to securely convert paper into HL7 CDA files that can be consumed by EHRs and EMRs, we are helping speed access to patient data and making the patient record more complete, while ensuring compliance to patient privacy mandates such as HIPAA.”

Health Story Project at HIMSS 2012 Interoperability Showcase

The Health Story Project was founded by a collaborative of healthcare vendors, providers and associations to develop and promote data standards through HL7 that support the flow of information between unstructured documents and electronic medical records. Using the HL7-approved CDA, Health Story standards create structured narrative data by using XML to tag, sort and export scanned documents into the EHR.

HL7 CDA messages enable the standardized passing of patient records to content consumers, such as an electronic health record systems and HIEs. Standards such as HL7 CDA help healthcare organizations extend interoperability across all aspects of patient care to eliminate error-prone manual processes and increase information accessibility.

“By supporting interoperability of scanning devices and EHR systems through the use of HL7, Nuance is supporting our mission of maintaining the patient story using all available channels, including the conversion of unstructured, scanned documents,” said Joy Kuhl, executive director, Health Story Project. “Using HL7 CDA helps meet Meaningful Use criteria because it leverages existing communication networks and workflow to populate the EHR from primary sources, such as paper records.”

Nuance is a member of the Health Story Project and will be demonstrating its standards-based scanning and document conversion of paper-based clinical documents as part of the Health Story demonstration in the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase. Participants in the Health Story demonstration will show how to maximize the information available to the EHR to maintain the patient story using all available channels, from unstructured, scanned documents to dictated consult notes and discharge summaries and notes enriched with abstractor, computer-assisted and NLP coding.

Visit Nuance at www.nuance.com