Software Dev Shop Implements QR Code Decoding with Dynamsoft's Barcode Reader SDK to Improve Productivity at an East Coast Healthcare Practice

QUICK SUMMARY

A small software development consultancy based on the US East coast has a healthcare practice client using an application to scan and manage patient records. The application automates document scanning, helping to reduce the number of steps otherwise required without the application. To increase productivity, it was decided the use of QR codes would help. For the software development shop, it was obvious that creating a barcode reader from scratch would be far too costly and time consuming. The firm had adopted Dynamsoft's Dynamic Web TWAIN SDK for document scanning a number of years ago. So, they now turned to Dynamsoft for a Barcode Reader SDK to automate document scanning and indexing with one tool. Now users are able to fill the scanner with documents of different types that come from different patients and press scan once to capture multiple documents. The barcode reader determines the correct patient ID and document type. The documents are then saved to the patient's record in the database. The automation has vastly improved efficiency.

CORPORATE PROFILE

The software development shop is a small consultancy, consisting of five employees. The firm works on many IT and programming jobs for a variety of clients. One client is a small healthcare practice using an application to scan and manage patient records. The team is always looking for ways to improve their client's application efficiencies, to improve user productivity and workflow. Thus, it regularly works to update client applications.

THE NEED

The healthcare practice that is supported by the software development company uses a records management application with two primary users. Currently, users can only place one document or patient record at a time in the scanner. Upon doing so, they then have to select the correct patient, select the correct document type, type a description, and finally press scan to then save the files.

To increase productivity, automatic document indexing was desired. After a bit of research, they decided to use QR codes and Dynamsoft's barcode reader SDK for barcode recognition. To implement the plan, the clinical data manager, a programmer and tester worked on the project to completion.

THE SOLUTION

For the software development shop, it was obvious that creating barcode reader software from scratch would be far too costly and time consuming. After all, they knew about extra development efforts before when they needed a document scanning module. The firm had adopted Dynamsoft's Dynamic Web TWAIN SDK to quickly build a web scanning module a number of years ago. In this case, the software development team also turned to Dynamsoft for a Barcode Reader SDK. It works as an add-on to Dynamsoft's Dynamic Web TWAIN SDK so that they can achieve document scanning and automatic document indexing with one tool.

The end goal was to automatically index the scanned documents. This included printing documents with an encoded QR code that had a record number and document type. QR-coded labels would be attached to documents that didn't already have a QR code pre-printed. The QR code is placed on the first page of a document. When scanning, the barcode reader determines the correct patient ID and document type. In a dashboard, users can then view the list of patients, documents recognized, and number of pages in each document and save the documents to the database.

With the new application, users now can fill the scanner with various documents from different patients, press scan once to capture all the documents and automatically index them. In all, the application took five months to create.

Dynamsoft's Barcode Reader SDK
Dynamsoft's Barcode Reader SDK allows application developers to almost instantly embed barcode decoding functionality into their web or desktop applications. It requires just a few lines of code instead of coding hundreds to more than a thousand lines from scratch. This is on top of also needing to spend many more months learning relevant standards. It saves months of development time and costs and also reduces the need for long-term staffing and costs for technical support issues.

Dynamsoft's Barcode Reader SDK provides C, C++, ActiveX / COM, .NET and PHP application programming interfaces (API). Once the SDK is integrated in an application, users can decode barcodes from various image file formats or from a PDF document. This also includes from device-independent bitmap (DIB) formats, which can be obtained from cameras or scanners. The SDK can be used as a standalone SDK, as well as an add-on to Dynamsoft's document imaging SDKs - Dynamic Web TWAIN and Dynamic .NET TWAIN.

Obstacles Overcome
While developing their application the software development team did encounter some technical issues involving reading a QR code from a particular image index in the buffer. With the assistance of Dynamsoft's technical support, the team was able to easily muscle through this obstacle.

The project was not straightforward either. The application had to manage scanned sets for which the QR codes can be on any of the pages. It had to store indexes of captured images which contain the QR code. The pages which contain QR codes involve the starting page of a document. So, a document will have "n" number of pages but the QR code might only be on the first page. An asynchronous method of reading multiple QR codes in multiple pages took extra time to develop and perfect. In this asynchronous method, before a QR code is read and its relevant data fetched from the server, it starts reading another QR code from another image from the image buffer. So, in order to overcome this, the application had to store the index number of the image along with each piece of data information collected from the QR code and its subsequent data received from the server.

In the end, the team came through with a working application.