Scanning 101 for electronic doctors’ offices

Know what I did last summer?   Killed some guy on the side of the road.  That’s what I might have said if I were Jennifer Love Hewitt.  Forgive the bad humor.

Actually, I invested in one of the single most valuable pieces of equipment in my office, a high speed scanner.  For the price tag of around $1,500.00, I was able to sidestep hiring another $35,000/year staff member to sit around and scan documents and old medical records all day long on our slow, old scanner.

Our trusty older scanner is part of an HP “all-in-one” printer combo that still sits in our office, performing its job of faithfully printing all of our documents, and scanning a very few documents lately.  The biggest problems with using this older multipurpose machine as a scanner included: (1) inability to print and scan at the same time, and (2) slowness at 5 pages per minute (let me just say, “OH MY GOD! THE PAIN!”).

Trust me guys, get yourselves some of the high speed stuff.  It’s such a joy to use the right tool for the right job.

About the author

Dr. Michael West

Dr. West is an endocrinologist in private practice in Washington, DC. He completed fellowship training in Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. West opened The Washington Endocrine Clinic, PLLC in 2009. He can be contacted at doctorwestindc@gmail.com.

2 Comments

  • I am a new PF user, about to start a pracyice in CA.
    How did you get around the small file upload size in practice fusion? Didn’t uploading full charts cause a problem?

  • I started the practice from no paper charts, so there was little to upload, but I am not aware of any limitations on file upload sizes. More recently, I have noted uploads going slower, like taking 15-20 sec, but this does not appear to depend upon file size as far as I can tell.

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories