Specializing in the health care industry, EDI Solutions (EDIS) automates the electronic capture of virtually any paper report, reformatting and inputting the captured data directly into any billing, electronic medical record (EMR) system or custom archive module. As Brad De Maso, President of EDIS explains: "When setting up the necessary electronic infrastructure to capture data and eliminate paper handling and data entry costs, paper handling and document access issues need to be re-evaluated and in many instances re-engineered. For some organizations, receiving data electronically, instead of on paper, requires a big adjustment. Depending on the nature and type of business, some organizations find it difficult to fully let go of the paper document. Typically it is more of a cultural issue than a technical one."

To ease the transition from paper to an electronic media, EDIS develops customized Document Search and Recovery (DSAR) Modules for its clients. For text search and retrieval within the DSAR, EDIS uses the dtSearch product line, with the actual product choice dependent on the selected client platform and solution. Platform choices include single user(s) dtSearch Desktop, multi-user dtSearch Network, and for a secure Intranet, dtSearch Web.

"dtSearch is our search engine of choice. Our health care clients need to search huge volumes of information," said Mr. De Maso. "The dtSearch Engine is able to navigate through gigabytes of data in only seconds. It is virtually maintenance free. It blows away database type data repositories in terms of document access speed."

With regard to designing and customizing the right DSAR module, EDIS will evaluate several different issues specific to their clients. Explains Mr. De Maso:

"First, can the source document be accepted as it is? If the source document is readable / viewable as is, then minimal front-end processing is required. Examples might include ASCII text files, Word documents, PDF files to name a few."

"Second, does the source document require significant pre-processing or re-formatting? Within health care it is very common that source documents need to be reformatted for easy viewing. In some instances margins are too wide to view the entire document or the source data is in a difficult to read delimited file format (HL7, ANSI X12, NSF, etc.). Reformatting is necessary for optimal viewing and re-printing. EDIS will write the code to reformat the source documents."

"Third, are there any custom sort parameters required? Many of our health care clients code directly from the DSAR module. EDIS has written applications to reformat transcription reports and save each report as an individual file with a unique date - name - procedure file name (i.e. 020315-doe-john-two_view_chest_0123456.txt). This allows our clients to sort reports by date of service and patient name. The preprocessing of the documents before dtSearch indexes them helps augment the desired search results."

For more information on EDIS, please call (916) 933-9646, fax (916) 933-7701, email sales@edisolutions.org, or visit their Web site at www.edisolutions.org.