Laparoscopic Ovarian Transposition to Preserve Ovarian Function Before Pelvic Radiation and Chemotherapy in a Young Patient With Rectal Cancer

Clinical order entry and data capture are 2 of the most arduous tasks that physicians face when working with an electronic medical record, or EMR. Of the various technologies available to automate order entry, the use of paper forms that are scanned electronically is the least disruptive to clinicians accustomed to working with traditional charts. Many physicians have resisted using electronic forms on tablet PCs, voice recognition, and other technologies that are used to implement Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) systems. From a clinical perspective, paper forms that are scanned by nonclinical workers in the background can be minimally disruptive to the clinical practice, especially if there is little or no modification of existing forms. Moving from a system based on paper charts to an EMR involves dealing with legacy data. For example, even if a physician happens to work in a hospital or clinic that has a full EMR, most patients who were seen by that doctor for even just a few years had some sort of print chart. If only part of a patient's record is online, then many of the advantages of an EMR – including timely access to pertinent data and the ability to search for past diseases and drug allergies – are obviated. One solution is to keep the paper chart around and summarize it as much as possible. The other is to move the pertinent data to the EMR by scanning the paper chart and converting the data to machine-readable and searchable text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. This article explores clinical data capture options offered by OCR and by Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) software.