An Extraction of Paper Records: An oral surgery practice uses two i2600s to scan patient records.

Oral Surgeon Dr. Smail beside the back-office i2600 Kodak document scanner



Challenge:
To move past the paper-based viewing and management of dental surgery patient records

Solution:
Two Kodak i2600 desktop document scanners to digitize documents on an as-needed basis

Result:
Quick, efficient, and simple retrieval and viewing of patient data in an easily workable format

Having worked with Dr. Smail for 15 years, Sheila, Darlene, and the rest of the staff have developed a powerful working relationship, complete with a process to provide exceptional Oral Surgery Care to patients. Along with that history, though, was generated a large volume of paper medical files. Immediately beside the front desk is an alcove of patient records—three walls of shelving that affords the staff relatively easy access to the patient data. You could say it was all working well, but Dr. Smail knew there was better way to manage the information.

Julie operates the Kodak i2600 document scanner at the front desk.

Already, he had begun to blaze the trail in digitizing patient records by outfitting the front counter with a Kodak camera set into a base to photograph x-rays, moving them from film to digital format long before other dentists in the area followed suit. “We’ve already helped other offices who didn’t know that you could take a JPG of an x-ray.” And so began the migration to digital records.

On the software side, East Hudson Oral Surgery installed OMS Vision, a dental office solution that provided a sophisticated system for tracking patient history and appointments, correspondence, and even treatment planning, along with a document viewer that could display scanned images of paper documents. As with any major transition to a new technology product, the first few weeks were challenging, but nothing the staff couldn’t handle. However, what naturally followed was the need to scan patient records into the database.

“I thought it would be another flatbed scanner like we were used to,” said Dr. Smail, mimicking the noisy and cumbersome characteristics associated with the old flatbed in the office. “But when we saw this thing (the Kodak i2600)…zip, zip, and you’re done.”

I had no idea they were that fast.

The “fast” he’s referring to is the 50 pages per minute of the Kodak i2600 desktop scanner, the mid-tier product in the award-winning i2000 series that comes with Perfect Page image processing and a 3-year warranty. Unobtrusively positioned beside one of the two computer stations at the front of the office, the i2600 digitizes bundles of records as patients are scheduled for new work.

The staff at East Hudson Oral Surgery

Surgical Assistant Annmarie says the office doesn’t perform cleaning and maintenance, but more advanced surgical procedures and dental work. Whether they scan a partial bundle or the entire record, according to Office Manger Shelia, depends on the type of work being done. “Extractions, we may just scan recent history. Implants require us to scan much further back.”

And there must be a significant amount of scanning going on—after only a few weeks, a bottleneck was still present in the workflow, so another scanner of the same model was added in a back office. “Both stay pretty busy,” said Julie, one of the several smiling individuals you might meet when approaching the desk.

As to why they chose to spend a few extra dollars to work with E-BizDocs instead of an online vendor, Shelia commented, “We prefer to deal locally. Previously, when we had switched away from a local provider, we didn’t get the same level of service that we needed.”

To ensure the best quality of scan, it’s imperative to keep on hand roller cleaning pads and replaceable rubber tires. So while it may not be part of their suite of services, cleaning and maintenance will definitely be somewhere in their future.

Check out the i2600 on our product page: Kodak i2600 desktop document scanner