Electronic Medical Record Project - Essay Example

PDF converter software is essential for this process .The software is necessary for converting the information from paper form into electronic one, through indentifying the texts from the scanned copy of the document and then saving this in an electronic form. The software also recognizes the open fields that require information to be filled in, and reserves them as such, so that an individual can then fill in such fields electronically, as opposed to manual filling in, when the document is found in a paper form (Devlin, 1996).

The whole process is estimated to take roughly three months. The consideration made to estimate time required is the process the document undergoes from its initial paper form to when it is converted into electronic form. The other consideration is the time it would take to back up the paper documents, just before the process of converting them to electronic form commences (Gerard, 1991). Additionally, time consideration is based on the size of the paper forms to be converted, and, the amount of text found on the form, as well as the nature of the changes deemed necessary, based on the suggested fields.

The fewer the documents to be converted, and the fewer the text incorporated, the quicker the conversion process (Penn, 1983). There are various challenges involved in converting a paper document into an electronic form of document. Some form fields may be discarded in the process, and suggested new ones presented to replace them. This is a challenge in that it might end up changing the whole nature of the form, making it completely different from how it appeared on the paper form (Gerard, 1991).

In case there are tables with empty cells that require to be filled in, they empty cells are converted into text boxes. This way, the nature of the form is distorted, as the text boxes may fail to fit in the actual spaces that were occupied by the empty table cells (Bruce, 1994). The greatest challenge posed by the conversion of a paper document into an electronic form is the fact that the original formatting of the paper document, as well as some paper content is lost during the conversion. After converting a paper document into an electronic form, some content, and details such as the watermarks, animated texts, page borders, line numbering, head and footnotes are lost (Harvey, 1994).

This makes some essential details of the document, which were in the paper form miss out in the electronic form. Some component of the paper such as the name, the address, contacts, as well as identification number for the patients will be made mandatory. This is necessary to ensure that the information obtained can be traced to the owner of the form. This is essential to help identify the health needs of each patient, as well as track their medical history. Making such components of the form mandatory ensures the responsible use of such forms, since anyone who uses the form in an inappropriate way will easily be identified.

Additionally, making such components mandatory ensures that the authenticity of the information given is safeguarded, and not tampered with (Devlin, 1996). This can be done by designing the form in a manner that it will indicate an error, whenever an individual wants to submit such a form without having filled in the mandatory fields (Bruce, 1994). The new form will be simple and less labor intensive, in that the speed of