The majority of our office image documents are PDF’s. From an earlier post I was discussing my issues with viewing PDF’s on reports in OpenEMR with Rod. I installed Image Magick and that did not solve my PDF viewing issues on reports but allowed me to view TIFF’s on reports. Now I have the reverse issue. In the ‘documents’ tree, I can view PDF’s as the Firefox’s Acrobat Reader Plug In allows that, however I was unable to view TIFF’s in the ‘documents’ tree until I added the FireFox Tiff plug in called “Alterna TIFF”. Our incoming/outgoing faxes are from Microsoft Fax which are all TIFF’s. I will be implementing Hylafax soon though.
What TIFF viewer are others using? Or is everyone sticking to one format either TIFF or PDF? I want to minimize confusion to end users that might be caused by having multiple viewers ( The Acrobat Reader plug in allows the user to scroll down to view multiple page PDF’s however AlternaTiff does not have a scroll bar for multiple page TIFF’s)
My faxes also come in as TIFF. I convert them to PDF before uploading to the patient’s chart. Paperport, which I also use for scanning, is pretty good at converting TIFF to PDF.
The only thing I do not store as PDF is the patient photograph. We photograph every patient and upload to the ‘Patient Photograph’ category in documents (if you do not have this category, you can add it). This makes the photo appear in the patient summary. I save the photographs as JPG because on some of our older machines, displaying a PDF slows things down which can frustrate the front office staff when going into a patient chart and waiting for the picture to load.
I was thinking the same thing also - keeping everything PDF. The only issue is the report generation. We have some Workers Compensation patients in our office, and periodically an MCO will ask for a WC patient’s records ( i.e. the last six months ) be faxed over. The OpenEMR report feature is great in that it allows all notes/encounters to be put together in one document for faxing ( our pre-OpenEMR process was a headache).
PaperPort 11.0 Professional is $199. Is it worth it?
>> PaperPort 11.0 Professional is $199. Is it worth it?
Until recently, I was using version 9 which came free on a CD with one of my printers. When I was buying multifunction Brother printer/scanners 2 years ago, all of them came with a free version of Paperport. It had all of the features I needed.
Last month, I needed to re-install and could not find any of those discs. I bought the full 11.0 version for $199. The only thing I like better is the scanning interface which makes sure you do not accidentally discard already scanned pages. This happens when, for example, you scan 100 pages but your scanner can only handle 25 at a time. With the old interface, if you clicked the wrong button after loading the next 25 pages, you might accidentally start over and lose those earlier pages. Otherwise, I have not gotten into other features which separate it from the free version.
So if you or anyone you know has the CDs from a recently purchased device with scanning capability, check for Paperport and save $199.
I am not sure how to disable Image Magick other then un-installing it at either command line or the package manager. I have Image Magick on our server and desktops and I have no issues with pdf’s and jpg conversion. All of our faxes are pdf and we upload them to openemr. From there the pdf’s are viewed by the pdf viewer in the browser. In our case this is Adobe Reader plugin for FireFox (3.0.6).