OK, as difficult as it was, the above is both accurate and confusing. Simply because what you are asking for is somewhat difficult and some things aren't specified. For instance, when you say churns out a page, do you mean paper or an electronic document?

Pretty much searchable items are going to be those that are entered into the chart. Imported items would be difficult, especially since it is difficult to search plain documents and because the II are in an entirely different folder.

While UpDox seems more and more incredible the more I hear about it, you will (I believe) still be limited by the fax coming in.

So, yes, if all your HbA1Cs were in the charts, you could, as Wayne said, do a search on them.

Now, if you wanted to search for certain words or phrases throughout your II, you could. One way would be to have your Adobe PDF software change the PDF from plain to OCR or Optical Character Recognition. Doing so, allows you to search through the document or documents.

So, it is possible, as we have done, to convert all of our files (> 6GB) to OCR. Now, we can't search for all potassiums under two, but we can say, "Who was it that had that glucose of 672," and search the entire database and find it. We have needed that maybe ten times in five years, so probably not worth it.

Now, there are fax machines which will import the PDF files as OCR PDFs. Next MFC I get I will get this.

Adobe also allows you to publish to the cloud and send a PDF to the cloud with a message to the email recipient. Sending plain email to patients is not HIPAA compliant, but your patients can sign a waiver. But, web portals such as with UpDox, allow you to do this. Adobe, allows the document to go securely to your Adobe site, and an email to be generated to the recipient.

You can certainly add sticky notes, but I have never been able to make them "stick" or even make them auditable.

Bottom line is this. To be honest, I think you have been very diligent about this, but I think one can also overthink it. Just come up with a workflow and see how it goes. It isn't etched in stone. I don't even think we had one to start.


Bert
Pediatrics
Brewer, Maine