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Fetal Monitoring

fetal-monitoring-strip-scanning

Fetal monitoring strips are used by physicians to monitor the health of the baby during delivery. They are also legal documents that can be used as evidence in a court of law.

Fetal monitoring strips can take up lots of space on storage racks and finding them in boxes can be a big waste of time for your medical staff. According to AHIMA’s recommended retention period*, you may need to keep them for 10 years after the age of majority, which is a total of 28 years!

This leads many hospitals and clinics to want to scan these fetal monitoring strips. The challenge in converting these documents into a digital image is that they can be quite long and most production-grade scanners cannot handle. So, what can you do?

The CASO Solution for Scanning Fetal Monitoring Strips

By working with our hospital clients, we discovered that we can scan these strips using large format scanners that we typically use for scanning large maps and drawings. Some of these scanners can handle as long as 300 feet. This is much longer than the average of 13 feet that we typically see with fetal monitoring strips. We can scan these strips in color, black & white or in grayscale at resolutions ranging from 200 to 600 dpi. These strips are then indexed with the patient’s information saved as PDFs, and are ready for upload into your document management or EHR system. Once in the system, you will be able to search for and retrieve these strips in seconds instead of digging through boxes for hours.

When stored in PDF format your staff can read these strips as if they were unfolding the actual paper strips. Using the printing tools in the Adobe Acrobat software you can also print out paper copies of the strips if you ever need a physical copy.

Contact us to learn more about scanning fetal monitoring strips or for a quote

 

* Please note: CASO does not provide legal advice on records retention schedules. These schedules are determined by federal, state and local agencies and organizational regulations that can change over time. Please contact your internal records management professionals or obtain legal guidance to ensure that you are in compliance with all of your records retention regulations.