Monday, November 30, 2009

Don't wait until next year to implement EMR

Physician practices and hospitals that have yet to select or implement an EMR system should get a move on. Those who wait until next year will face a "high risk" of failing to achieve "meaningful use" of health IT in time for the 2011-12 federal incentives, Mark Leavitt, chairman of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, warned at the annual AHIMA conference on Monday in Grapevine, Texas.

"You're dreaming if you think you can achieve it in less than a year," Leavitt said, referring to hospitals. Achieving meaningful use of an EMR system will take at least 18 months, if not two years, he warned.

HHS expects to publish its criteria for certification of EMRs under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as well as its definition of "‘meaningful use" for qualifying for ARRA Incentives, by the end of the year. Both measures should be finalized by spring 2010 after a public comment period. All told, the federal government will pony up $34 billion in incentives for meaningful use of certified EMR technology--the equivalent of what the U.S. spent to send the first man to the moon, Leavitt said

Read more: http://www.fierceemr.com/story/dont-wait-until-next-year-implement-emr-leavitt-warns/2009-10-06#ixzz0YTVn0XTO

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Sunday, November 15, 2009

3 Different Types of Document Scanners

Are you in need of a document scanning solution for your business? Companies of all sizes are discovering that they need a high-quality professional scanner to make their jobs easier. The most important thing to know when buying this product is that there are three core types of document scanners which are each different from one another.
Those three types of document scanners are:
Flatbed Scanner. This type of document scanner is probably the type that you have already used before. This is the type of scanner which requires you to lift the lid of the scanner and to place the sheet to be scanned on a piece of glass. The image scanner within the machine moves across the page and scans it in this manner.

Sheet-Fed Scanner. The sheet-fed scanner actually works in much the same way as the flatbed scanner. The difference for you as a user is that you don’t place the sheet that you are scanning on to the glass. Instead you feed the sheet through the scanner.

Hand Held Scanner. Not too many people have used the handheld scanner but it is good for certain types of businesses. As the name suggests, you actually hold the scanner and move it across the page that you wish to scan.

Before buying a document scanner you should figure out which of these three types of scanners are most appropriate to your business. That will narrow down your shopping choices considerably and make it a lot easier to choose the scanner that is right for you.

Info From www.instantkeywordresearch.com

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Sunday, November 1, 2009

Document Scanner

It’s hard to imagine what people did before the advent of document scanners. These handy electronic devices allow anybody with a hard copy of a document to place it on a flat bed or insert it into a document feeder, hit a button, and then viola, they have a digital copy of their document. One can only imagine how much the secretaries and administrative assistants of the past would have loved to have had one of these handy document scanners back in the days before office technology was readily available.

The basic definition of a document scanner is that it is a device that can be used to convert a document, an image, handwriting or even an object into digital format. The most common types of document scanners are known as desktop or flatbed scanners, and their usage is very simple. Someone places something that they want to convert to a digital image – perhaps a fax just received, a schematic drawn up by the engineering department, or even a knick knack that they wish to sell on an online auction site – onto the document scanner’s flat surface, and push the button (usually located on the document scanner itself or accessed through software used to program the document scanner.) This produces a document on the computer to which the scanner is hooked up. From there, the user can manipulate the document, share it with the world, or generally do just about whatever he or she wants with it. Document scanners are very handy devices in the home, office or anywhere else, and the technology is older than you might think.

Document scanners can actually trace their history back to the 1920’s with the early telephotography input devices. Basically, these early versions of document scanners consisted of a rotating drum with a single photodetector at a standard speed of 60 or 120 rpm (later models up to 240 rpm). They sent a linear analog AM signal through the standard telephone voice lines to receptors, which synchronously printed the proportional intensity on special paper. As with much modern technology, document scanners have been around for quite a bit longer than they have been commercial available and affordable to most consumers.


Desktop or flatbed scanners are not the only types of document scanners available, either. Handheld scanners, though less common than desktop or flatbed document scanners, are out there. Handheld scanners, sometimes called wand scanners, are not useful for document scanning though. Instead they are used in industrial applications such as for industrial design, reverse engineering, test and measurement, orthotics, etc. They are also used in gaming and virtual reality.
Document scanners are becoming an ubiquitous part of the modern household and office. They are becoming just as important as the other office staples – computers, printers, faxes and copy machines, and that is why they are often bundled together with peripherals that have those other functionalities in “all in one” packages. For example, popular all in one bundles these days include a printer, a fax machine, a document scanner, and a copying machine all in one single electronic device.

Document scanners have proved their usefulness to in the office and in the business of making money, but they have also proven their use in other ways. For example, historians and genealogists have co-opted scanners for use in their hobby. Genealogists – people who study family history (their own and others) – have been known to use scanners to send pictures of relatives, important places, important and very aged non-electronic documents such as wills and military records, to relatives who have dispersed all over the world. Truly the document scanner is a diverse invention that is being used in many disparate ways.

Info Courtesy of http://www.bestbrandtobuy.com/

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