As you will already know, the NHS is moving to all patient records being available digitally by 2020 as stipulated by the Government, a date rapidly approaching.

Docs2Digital have already undertaken and completed Medical Record Scanning projects in NHS Health Centres for the conversion of patient notes to digital. 

We have found that It is typical for large amounts of paperwork for each and every patient to have accumilated over time from doctors notes, in depth reports and other medical records such as results. These documents normally need to be retained for an exceptionally long time, meaning space for storage becomes an issue very quickly. 

We at Docs2Digital have experience with handling these documents, as they will have been stored in ways that make the use of these records in paper format extreemly difficult and impractical. Not only do they take up huge amounts of space but records get misfiled and potentialy lost, causing a new file to be created at times. We find the patient notes become torn, folded, ripped and further deterioate from there age and handling from being repeatedly stuffed back into the Lloyd George folders. 

Docs2Digital are happy to take on this daunting task of converting these poorly stored records and convert into easy to ready digital images. The end result being a pleasure to our existing NHS Medical Centres and Doctors Surgery’s – Practices as they no longer battle with their patient notes. They cannot rave enough on the time saving, as they now find their patient notes in seconds, say how easy it is to use when it used to take them hours or days before to find a patients notes. This has also saved the need to store large amounts of paperwork and remove the physical storage cost too, as once scanned there is no outlay in storing these documents digitally, just the small space on a servers hard drive. 

Docs2Digital scan to digital formats, such as tif, pdf, and jpg but principally to pdf for these kinds of records. We also use sophisticated scanning enhancement software, therefore any creases or deterioration in the paper document ends up actually looking better digitally by the end of the process! 

Medical Record Scanning of notes tend to follow a similar format, containing typically General Correspondence, Doctors Notes, Medical Test Results etc. Depending on your preference, these can either be scanned as a single multipage file, scanned in sections or have the option of bookmarking a first page of each section like a previous paper file divider had before. 

When we index, the data commonly used will be the Surname, First Name, Date of Birth, Patient NHS Number and E-MIS number but any number of indexing areas can be used. Our aim is to always mimic the way you currently operate, so everything feels logical and similar. Should you use Practice Management Software, then we can always look to scan in a format to allow the scanned documents to be easily be imported. We can even discuss and demonstrate software we recommend for creating a database storage and retrieval system that will also allow further documents too be added.

High levels of security can be attached to these documents after scanning, via access rights setup on your documents within your server infastructure though they should be imported into your Practice Software such as E-MIS. 

We also have our recommended document management software. Virtual Cabinet has been designed to simplify the storage, access and security of your documents with many beneficial features available to use.