[PLUG-TALK] High speed document scanners

[Keith Lofstrom]

Does anybody here have document scanner experience?

Over the next few months, I will be arranging the scanning of the
equivalent of about a 50 foot high stack of paper - my doctor
wife's charts, as we transition to electronic medical records.  

These are in manila folders, with clips and tabs and stickies
and all sorts of time-consuming complications.  We would like
to store the charts more-or-less intact after we are done, just
in case, and reassembling them accurately (keeping all the
detritus together) will make the task even more excruciating
for the office worker who does this.

I imagine we will photocopy the stickies and loose stuff onto
8.5x11 pages and combine them with the scan flow.

The fattest single charts are perhaps 3 inches thick, most are
about half an inch thick.  The charts include lab result carbons,
fax paper, paper of very random thickness and surface smoothness,
with the occasional stapled or taped inclusion.  Probably we will
need to photocopy those, too.

Because of patient confidentiality, and the need to access these
active charts day-to-day,  we can't just put the paper on a boat
to China and hope we get some usable bits back.

Daunting task.  Has anyone here done scan jobs like that? 
Suggestions for which scanner to use, where to lease one? 
Workflow suggestions?  OCR software suggestions?   Horror stories?

I'm pretty sure I can design a functional workflow, but I would
prefer to learn what works for others before we burn a lot of
staff time.  "Do it wrong, do it twice" is unfortunately quite 
common for medical IT functions - doctors and staff are trained
about biology and disease, not workflow and software and hardware.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs