Case Study: athenahealth achieves faster patient care by digitizing 4,000,000 pages per week with ABBYY FineReader Engine

athenahealth Drives Faster Patient Care by Digitizing 4,000,000 Pages Per Week With ABBYY

athenahealth, a cloud-based EHR provider serving more than 85,000 providers and 83 million patients, was processing roughly 250,000 faxed medical records per day (about 4 million pages per week). Their legacy OCR struggled with the growing volume and diversity of clinical documents, causing quality and efficiency bottlenecks and prompting the need for a flexible, scalable, fully automated solution to convert incoming faxes into EHR-ready data in real time.

athenahealth integrated ABBYY FineReader Engine into its Perl/Linux capture pipeline; FineReader proved twice as accurate as the nearest competitor, handled varied document types, and minimized manual review. The solution scaled to 250k documents/day (~4M pages/week), expanded real-time data capture (including demographics), sped delivery of information to clinicians, and improved EHR workflow efficiency without adding staff.

athenahealth

Alison Lo

Senior Developer