Friday, September 14, 2007

Managing Data On Your Hard Drive

During the discussion of how a hospital might sort files generated by dictating physicians and upload them to each physician's email address, you were probably asking: "What do I do with the files once I receive them? After I decompress all this stuff, what am I supposed to do with it?"

  • The first thing you do is print out the files that need to be placed in each patient's chart.

  • The second thing you do is make sure that these files are safely stored in a password-protected subdirectory for further use.

  • Today's also allow users to search through any and all files for a certain string of text.

Thus, if you needed to research all correspondence related to a patient named Eliza Doolittle, you could search for text strings containing the words "Eliza"and "Doolittle." The computer would quickly locate these files and identify them for you.

Suppose you were asked by a third party payer to provide additional documentation on a patient? If you had only received paper copies of all reports from the hospital or transcription agency, you would be forced to manually enter all the information into a new document.

However, with the text stored in "soft copy," after reading the information in each file you could easily build a new document by "cutting" blocks of text from each of the appropriate files on your hard drive and then "pasting" text into a newly-created document.

You could then transmit this newly-created document directly to its addressee from your computer!



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