Some of you are lucky enough to have legacy electronic databases(!). Focusing on
outpatient practices, most have paper charts, sometimes supplemented with computers
for scheduling and billing. My question, what is the rational approach to migrating
the paper to the electronic medium? Can we have an interim system utilizing scanned
and OCR-interpreted old documents (mainly for typeset data)? Basic data info can be
keyed in...including problem lists and medications. Also, the fax seems to be the
pervasive "hi-tech" tool that lingers. How can this be harnessed appropriately? I
know the results of such an endeavor would not be easily searchable, etc. etc. It
just seems like such a quantum leap between the paper and electronic chart and the
result of going full throttle would be redundant and time-consuming record handling
for existing patients in a practice.
Sincerely,
Robert Jordan
PS: I have looked into sending fax from a browser via a server's fax modem in Java,
say for prescription writing or consultant reports. I think the javax.comm package
provides some of the necessary classes but I'm not sure how to proceed from there.
Anyone ever have success with this problem?
application/ms-tnef
