Short Paper-to-Digital Transition (Requiring no data entry by experienced staff)
Unfortunately, physicians often overlook the conversion process from paper chart to an electronic system when evaluating and purchasing an EMR solution. Established practices have a profusion of existing paper patient charts; when implementing an EMR system, these charts must either be incorporated into the new system or maintained-on paper-as a separate "archive," necessitating the ongoing use of two distinct chart systems for several years. While incorporating the paper documents into the electronic record is obviously preferable, this too is problematic. Many EMR solutions require the information in past medical records to be manually typed into the new system; this requires a highly-trained staff member to meticulously review each page of the existing patient chart and type it into the electronic chart. This labor-intensive posting process is error-prone and can delay full implementation of the EMR system for months, if not years. Because the re-entered data is not admissible in court as legal documentation of patient encounters, the paper copies must still be maintained in storage. Some vendors have attempted to circumvent these problems by scanning the paper chart en bloc and saving it as a separate file, linked to each patient's "new" chart; unfortunately, it is still maintained as a separate, non-indexed set of documents, and is not fully integrated into the new system. These delays and deficiencies of the conversion process alone have deterred many practices from incorporating an EMR system.

The transition from a paper-based system to an electronic system requires no data entry with eMRimaging.™ We concluded that the easiest and most efficient method of converting all previous medical records to an electronic format was through an imaging system that captures digital images of previous records, and fully incorporates them into the electronic patient chart. With eMRimaging,™ every past medical record is scanned into the system with high-speed scanners in batches that are electronically labeled. Essentially, a high-resolution digital image of the previous record is captured in the PDF file format, and a labeling and indexing function is incorporated into each file. This provides an electronically organized archive of every paper record once stored in racks, and has been proven to be the most efficient and reliable solution for converting paper to electronic format.