We get previous medical records on CD all the time. However, we have had trouble importing them into the system, especially as with today’s bloated documentation even a not very complicated medical history will cover at least 100 pages of PDF documents. eCW lets us only import 3 mB which is nothing. The helpful suggestion by eCW support was that “we have to find some program on the internet” to decrease the file size so it can be imported. There are plenty of online programs that of course are not exactly HIPPA compliant. So on some charts we literally printed the whole chart on paper and imported the paper chart as there is no size limit. This is also very environmentally sensitive as we have too many trees anyway.
So the bottom line is we have accumulated by now about 50 CD’s in our storage cabinet that we were unable to import. Until we came up with a truly ingenious solution: We recently changed our fax to the online fax which is an 800 number directly into the SAAS server. But we still have the old computer sitting there with a fax modem. So we ended up faxing the PDF document from the old fax computer into the server fax. It takes about 3 hours per CD but it works. There seems to be no size limits on faxes.
I would ask you please commend us on this truly magnificent solution as we are very proud about our ingenuity:).
On a more serious note, pretty pitiful that we have to use such a stupid workaround. Does eCW actually have some kind of an explanation why there is a limitation on CD’s and not on faxes/scanning? This should have been fixed in the beta version.