Yeats Clinical EHR System Relies on Dynamsoft's Dynamic Web TWAIN to Enable Heavy-Lifting Document Management Features

SUMMARY

Medicomp Solutions is an Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management (PM) technology solutions provider. The company offers its flagship product, Yeats Clinical™, to physicians, clinicians and primary care providers. As an EHR cloud software solution, it helps them streamline healthcare practice operations to save time, increase efficiencies, profitability, and improve the quality of patient care. One of the goals for the Yeats Document Management System (DMS) module is to help medical practices deal with the large volume of paperwork. Within Yeats Clinical, Medicomp Solutions leveraged Dynamsoft's Dynamic Web TWAIN software development kit (SDK) to provide the scanning functionality in the DMS module. The SDK helped Medicomp Solutions deliver greater reliability and quality software. In the short-term, it saved the company significant time, effort and capital from having to develop its own scan and capture solution. In the long run, it will save Medicomp Solutions from having to also keep pace with industry technology changes over time. Today users of Yeats Clinical's DMS module can scan all patient documents and upload them directly to cloud storage. Medicomp Solutions knows it can count on the SDK's critical capabilities which include cross-platform document scanning support, portability between popular web browsers, 32/64-bit support, and of course technical support.

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Medicomp Solutions is an Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management (PM) technology solutions provider. The leadership team has a combined 40+ years of experience in medical practice operations and management. With a focus on physicians, clinicians and primary care providers, Medicomp Solutions' software serves to streamline healthcare practice operations to save time, increase efficiencies, profitability, and improve the quality of patient care. This is made possible in the company's flagship product, Yeats Clinical, an EHR cloud software solution.

Yeats Clinical is designed to aid medical practitioners and professionals in maintaining and updating relevant medical data gathered during encounters with patients or individuals under their care. Yeats Clinical features an integrated patient charts management and practice management packaged into one EHR application.

IMPLEMENTING A DMS IN YEATS CLINICAL

One of the goals for Yeats Clinical's Document Management System (DMS) is to help medical practices deal with their customary large of volume of paperwork. Without an EHR that has a DMS integrated, the practice would have to manage their documents using a physical filing system (typically folder bins). They'd have to physically make sure physicians and / or nurses have reviewed these documents. They'd also have to store these documents in locked filing cabinets. For these reasons and many others, most medical practices today have either gone or are seeking to go paperless in their operations. This includes scanning all current patients' charts into systems for better storage, access, collaboration and control as needed.

BUILDING OUT THE SCANNING

Medicomp Solutions leveraged Dynamsoft's Dynamic Web TWAIN software development kit (SDK) to provide the scanning functionality in the DMS module. Five people were involved in the use case analysis, design and development of Yeats Clinical's DMS and integration of the SDK. There were also three software developers and one tester. Additionally, Medicomp Solutions had a representative from the Beta site to help with use case analysis, demonstrations, and usability feedback. It took about four weeks to design and develop the DMS module and integrate Dynamsoft's SDK. Then, the company spent an additional three weeks on testing with end users and on minor bug fixes.

There are significant advantages to Medicomp Solutions using a well-developed and reliable SDK. First, it helped them deliver greater reliability and quality software. Dynamsoft's SDK saved the company significant time, effort and capital from having to develop its own scan and capture solution. More importantly, the technology 'eco-system' is an ever-changing challenge. Yeats Clinical was developed to work across different platforms via web browsers. This would have required the company to also be responsible for keeping pace with image capture industry technology changes. And, not just for their own infrastructure but, also for their clients' infrastructures. Specialized SDK providers, like Dynamsoft, take on these burdens so companies like Medicomp Solutions can stay focused on their core offerings.

Along the way to integrating the SDK, Medicomp Solutions' team encountered only a few obstacles that it resolved. The team pushed through and generally were able to keep to the expected timeline.

APPLICATION ADVANTAGES

With help from Dynamsoft's Dynamic Web TWAIN SDK, today users of Yeats Clinical's DMS module can scan all patient documents and upload them directly to cloud storage. This allows providers and nurses across a practice to share scanned patient documents. It helps ensure documents don't go missing on local computers and helps avoid missing papers. It makes scanned documents easy to find and manage while reducing the amount of paperwork to be done.

Yeats Clinical's DMS module had to meet three objectives. If it was going to be helpful for practices to go paperless, it had to be a robust solution that could handle large volumes of documents daily. Downtime is also largely intolerable. So, the DMS had to be highly reliable. And, the DMS module had to seamlessly integrate with all web browsers and be able to upload scanned images to a cloud server blob. Dynamsoft's SDK has proved to be an advantageous tool to accomplish all these objectives.

Today, Medicomp Solutions knows it can count on Dynamsoft and their SDK's critical features. This includes cross-platform capabilities, portability between popular web browsers, 32/64-bit support, and of course technical support.

Medical practices that adopt Yeats Clinical vary in size, ranging from individual physician medical practices to large ambulatory practices and clinics. There are nearly 100 staff users that can include physicians, nurses, medical assistants, front desk receptionists and billing staff. They access the DMS and scan documents into cloud storage. The volume of files scanned is large. For example, one customer currently has roughly 34,000 documents scanned into the DMS. They average 420 document scans daily.

A Closer Look at the Patient Chart and Progress Notes Features Within Yeats Clinical

Users can today easily scan and upload documents of various types. They can search for a patient to attach documents to their profile too. It's also important that users can adjust settings, such as simplex and duplex scanning, ADF or flatbed, color or black and white, resolution, choosing to discard blank pages, and more. In addition, they can manipulate a document's orientation, size, crop, and navigate between pages or remove specific pages. They can of course name the file, include a specific document date, specify a document category, upload the document to a blob cloud storage server, and more. These features and more are made possible in Yeats Clinical with the help of the Dynamic Web TWAIN SDK.

About Dynamic Web TWAIN
Dynamic Web TWAIN provides developers with tools to create immediate cross-browser and cross-platform document scanning capabilities. Users can scan documents from TWAIN and SANE-compatible scanners using a variety of browsers - Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer (IE), Safari, and others – across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android operating systems. Images can be saved in various file formats – JPEG, TIFF, PDF, and more – or transferred and stored across varying protocols, local or remote file systems, database and document repositories.

Dynamsoft also offers imaging add-on modules that cover barcode reading, webcam image capture, PDF rasterizing, and optical character recognition (OCR).

Dynamic Web TWAIN provides programmers with simple built-in interfaces to access local imaging devices from web pages. They need only write a handful of lines of JavaScript code to enable cross-browser document scanning, uploading, and processing. It saves on costs by eliminating months of work coding from scratch to create comprehensive scanning and image capture functions. Development teams also realize long-term time and cost savings with better application robustness and faster time to market.

After Thoughts
Medicomp Solutions' team understands that without Dynamsoft's SDK, they would have been forced to learn TWAIN standards and protocols, then write thousands of lines of code for months or longer. Instead, the SDK let them focus on core components they wanted in the application. They also are grateful for having the assurance of Dynamsoft and its community reporting to resolve most bugs, a security vulnerability, and other issues. Dynamsoft's technical support team also directly helped Medicomp Solutions' development team in fixing bugs and counseled them numerous times.

Currently there are no plan to expand the DMS. But in the long run, Medicomp Solutions believes there may come a need to track laboratory specimen handling. This would require integrating a barcode reader in the DMS. If so, as a result of the experience with Dynamsoft's document scanning SDK, Medicomp Solutions already knows it will use Dynamsoft's Barcode Reader SDK.