Mrs. V-Tail has been keeping her patient records the old fashioned way, hand written notes in file folders, in a filing cabinet.

The practice that she contracts to has decided, retroactively, that all patient records have to be online, using Practice Fusion software.

She has a shitload of records that need to get into the system. The handwritten notes can be scanned into the database. The practice has a scanner, but it is at the front desk where patients check in, pay their bills, etc., and the only way that she can use it is to stay late (very late) or to go into the office on weekends. So, life would be easier if she had her own scanner.

Any scanner that will connect to her Mac will do the job. USB connection is probably simplest.

She does not need anything sophisticated, plain old black & white (text) scanning is fine, no requirement for color, no OCR, the documents do not need to be searchable so conversion to text is not a requirement. The source documents are all on 8 1/2" x 11" standard letter size paper.

It does need to have a document feeder, as opposed to flatbed. Two-sided scanning is needed. I can't think of any other requirements, offhand.

Does anybody have a recommendation? Or maybe even one for sale? This does not need to be a super-duper heavy duty scanner, once the backlog is scanned, the workload for this might be an hour or two / week, if that much.

How about the document scanner on an iPhone? Part of the "Notes" app. It's what I use. Very handy.

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:
How about the document scanner on an iPhone? Part of the "Notes" app. It's what I use. Very handy.

I use similar called CamScanner. Quite handy. For thousands of documents I'd research companies that can scan for her, or hire a college kid to do it.

Find a multi-function printer that has the scan features you need. I think I paid about $200 for the Epson I have. It has a feeder, scans both sides, prints double sided etc....

https://www.amazon.com/stores/...ery=scansnap%20ix500

Wife has been using this Fuji product. Very fast, scan 8.5x11 in seconds. pc or mac
regards, Jack

I have the HP7200 all in one, has worked for years.

I'll second the scansnap. I have had one for 4-5 years and am very pleased with it. My father has been using two of them at his law practice for probably close to 10 years.

ScanSnap.

Not a chance in hell I'd recommend using a phone app for what sounds like at least hundreds of double-sided documents.

The Scansnap is awesome. Expensive, but well worth it. I can stack about 30 pages in the feeder and run them thru in a few seconds.

I'll give a +1 on the ScanSnap. One of my clients has put one on every desk in their business office, and they are fast and reliable. Not one service call in over two years of heavy daily use.

Software updates can be a bit of a pain as they don't use the App Store, but other than that, I'd give them 100%.

I just bought an HP OfficeJet Pro 8710 all-in-one...been working like a charm! Newegg has one for $145. Amazon shows a refurbished one for $99...

http://a.co/akcfmxQ

I have one you can borrow until you are done if you need it.

You have email...

A

Scansnap. Buy once, cry once.

I like the scansnap as well but if you want something small, light and very portable I also like the Brother DS Mobile 720

I have a Scansnap S510 and it's been great.

I went completely paperless after getting my ScanSnap. Super fast (about 1 page per second) and clear document images. Not photograph quality, but perfect for documents. Also does both sides in one pass.

ScanSnap ix500. Works perfectly with the Mac. I'd look at this offer from Amazon at $419.
One thing: I scan to Adobe Acrobat so I can do all kinds of things with the pdf from the scanner. There is other software that's cheaper, but I've used Amazon for years.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap is very reliable, fast, accurate, and includes ScanSnap Manager software that will save your documents to pdf format, even do the OCR for you if you want.
I recommend against a multi-purpose scanner/printer/fax. If one function goes wrong, you're toast.

I did a lot of research and ended up with the Epson ES-300. I think I didn't want to pay for the fancier Fujitsu unit, I don't remember.

The dedicated document scanners are MUCH faster than the all-in-one printer/scanner/etc. machines because they scan both sides of the page at once as the paper goes through. The all-in-ones usually have to scan one side, run the paper through to flip it over, then scan the other side.

The ES-300 is 25 double-sided sheets per minute. Some of the high end Fujitsu machines are even faster.

I also use the CamScanner phone app and it works surprisingly well for a few pages, but I wouldn't want to sit down and scan hundreds of pages with it, which is easy with a dedicated document scanner.

My vote too is for an "all in one". My recently acquired Brother black & white laser DCP-L2540DW has been outstanding.

If you’re doing it yourself, I’d look into a all-in-one with a document feeder tray. Doing something like this with an iPhone is, IMO, a no-go (basically you’d be taking an individual picture of each page). I have a Brother all-in-one that does a nice job. You just feed them in thru the feeder tray and they come out. You can physically print them or have them saved to PDFs on the Mac. It’s connected by network or USB.