Improvement of Scanned Medical Document Management System

Abstract

Some medical documents must be scanned, stored and then retrieved quickly. This paper presents a design and evaluation of a new scanned medical document management system to meet such requirements. The system is a part of a Hospital Information System (HIS) and utilizes a database server, instead of a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server used in the existing management system. Barcodes and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology are also deployed to identify a medical document before being uploaded to the server. The system was evaluated in twofold. Firstly, the message transfer delays to and from the database server were measured. Secondly, the DeLone and McLean model of information systems success was used to construct a questionnaire to validate the system effectiveness. The evaluation results showed that the upload time of the documents to the database server was 1.34 times faster than that to the FTP server. Similarly, the download time of the documents from the database server was 10 times faster than that from the FTP server. The questionnaires also clearly indicated that real users expressed satisfaction with the system. Hence, the proposed system is faster and effective.