If there’s one major challenge to single out in healthcare IT today, it would be leveraging the growth and usage of big data. While consumer IT made big advances in the past decade to get a handle of data by marking up content, indexing it, and annotating it for use, enterprise, and healthcare IT in particular, still need to catch up on making data actionable.
A typical healthcare office handles tens of thousands of documents for patient records, legal, finance, billing processes. In pharma and biotech, a typical FDA drug review process, involves multiple stages of trials, testing, applications, marketing and manufacturing for the new drug – all requiring a mind-blowing amount of paperwork. In all these cases, either the collected data is not timely or relevant, or it doesn’t present enough opportunity to easily access, archive for the future or comply with legal standards.
This article provides insights into how using the Portable Document Format (PDF) and accompanying tools within healthcare organizations can be a powerful way to help solve the unstructured data challenge, speed up processes, and reduce the costs for document handling.
We will explain why PDF, with its ability to contain data structure and interactivity, is the perfect document format for meeting the archiving, accessibility and compliance requirements of the healthcare industry. We will also examine the building blocks of a solution that helps create such compliant PDF documents, and deep dive into the ways to organize and structure PDFs.
