[tomjen3]

Would a physical fax machine that saved the incoming faxes as a searchable PDF on a network drive make sense? It could literally just have a folder you put things in and then you could select the recipient on some webmanager.

[cknight]

At the moment we have non-searchable PDFs coming in to a network drive. These are manually reviewed and sent to the relevant GP's inbox (or to nursing or to management) as necessary, with the relevant patient selected so all the doctor has to do is read it and hit "accept" or "seen". They're not willing to do more than that, of course.

Adding in OCR to make the documents searchable doesn't help a lot on its own. Just because one of our GP's names is listed on a fax doesn't mean it's actually for them, nor does another name mean it is the patient in question. A lot of names get put on these documents. Every fax we get is laid out differently, there's no consistency of any kind. Faxes being unreliable means we are sent plenty of duplicates, half-sent documents, and upside down ones too.

Nothing can beat an electronic message that contains the recipient doctor's ID, the patient's name and birth date (we have plenty with same names), and all the other relevant info. It's the only way forward.

[ocrcustomserver]

If this is important to you (extraction of information like ID/name/date from non-searchable PDFs), you could send me an email and we could discuss it further.

I might be able to help you with this.