On Monday 02 April 2007 22:43, syan tan wrote: > To attach metadata , each file can be associate with a gesture , e.g. > double-click, and a dialog pops up with a search/select patient section, > a search/select specialist sectin, and some text field's, possibly combo > box, to associate a patient condition, or free text description of > what the document is about. > Any criticisms welcome regarding this concept of a workflow.
This is how my own scanning application started out, but in daily practice it showed flaws. We scan from a) a high speed duplex document scanner: often casuals I employ to get rid of our paper based archive b) MFC devices with duplex capable scanners in each consulting room and at reception - where occasional documents are scanned in when we happen to get our hands on them Scanned documents are then tagged with meta data by one of my 3 receptionists or practice nurse, and occasionally by doctors - sometimes all working at it at once To allow this, the documents have to be stored on a single file server accessible to all. There has to be a file locking mechanism to prevent concurrent meta data editing, and there has to be some mechanism that prevents network congestion when you scan documents from several high speed scanners at once. Then, additional band width and or processor time/memory are consumed by transferring the lot into the data base after tagging with meta data. Compare to the simplicity and foolproofness of this: a) any document scanned is directly stored on the database backend, but tagged as "unfiled" b) client programs now access the unfiled data in exactly the same way as the filed data, no need for multiple methods, no need for consuming resources multiple times For convenience, I have a scheduled script that picks up any files in a drop-in directory (eg for data from digital cameras) and pushes them into the database backend, tagged as "unfiled". It is our convention that such images have to be tagged "inline", eg photos have to have patient identification, date etc. on the photo so that meta data tagging in computer readable form can happen by humans any time later Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
