4+ million pages
accurately processed per week
Challenge
A better solution for recognizing and converting millions of medical document pages a week
In 1997, Jonathan Bush and Todd Park created a software solution for dealing with the frustrating volume of paper records that their birthing practice generated — founding athenahealth in the process. By 2012, clients were faxing millions of medical documents every month to athenahealth’s service — which captures and converts the data into EHRs and integrates them into clients’ workflows. “Essentially,” said Alison Lo, Senior Developer, athenahealth, “we handle the healthcare record workflow for providers. Our cloud-based EHR receives clinical documents via fax, automatically recognizes and converts them into EHRs, populates the medical records and then takes over the entire workflow, routing relevant information to the right people.”
However, the company’s fast-growing customer base and the increasing complexity of health records had pushed athenahealth’s capture solution to its limits. “There were quality issues,” explained Lo.
“The speed and accuracy of our old OCR software were drags on efficiency. And we anticipated big year-onyear increases in the number of faxes and their mix of data: demographic information, medical charts, X-rays, records featuring text with embedded images, you name it. We needed something that could handle it all.”
In looking for a solution, the athenahealth team counted flexibility, scalability, and ease of integration as key requirements — as well as speed and accuracy. “We were looking to the long term,” said Fuchang Yin, Staff Developer, athenahealth. “And tight integration with our systems was key. That’s why, after testing OCR SDKs from a variety of vendors, we chose ABBYY FineReader Engine.”
