Built and verified, switched off on purpose
Verified on three real packets and wired in as a job. Filing is held until the agency approves the completeness rule; until then every packet routes to review, which is the safe default.
The situation
A California home health agency’s start-of-care packet has about seven different forms in mixed letter and legal sizes, printed double-sided and scanned up to about 100 pages per feed. Staff sorted it and filed it to each chart by hand.
The cost of leaving it alone
Misfiled admission paperwork is a PHI incident waiting to happen, and an incomplete packet found at survey time is a finding.
What we built
The office printer scans into a synced SharePoint library. A job on a local server reads each page with OCR, drops blank backs, and recognizes each form from a table. It identifies the patient by fuzzy-matching names across at least two pages against the EMR census, and refuses to file on any disagreement. It then writes one PDF per form into the patient’s chart in a separate, restricted clinical site.
Completeness is checked against the agency’s own admission policy: not whether a form is present, but whether the policy’s required documents are covered. Incomplete packets go to review, and re-scans after a paper jam are recognized so a packet is not filed twice.
Tesseract OCR on an encrypted local serverPython and poppler PDF toolsSharePointPrinter scan-to-share
Why AI, or why not
No. OCR plus deterministic matching does the job. Blank pages are found by a fixed grey level rather than by OCR text length, because OCR invents about two thousand characters from the speckle on a blank back.
The results
How PHI was protected
- Page images and the OCR working files are processed on agency-controlled hardware, on an encrypted volume. No cloud model is involved.
- Emails and cards were verified to carry no patient name or record number.
- Filing goes to a private clinical site hidden from the address list.
- The OCR write cache was moved onto the encrypted volume after the default turned out to be plain disk.
What we would tell you to skip
Forms and policy documents are not one-to-one: one consent sheet can satisfy five documents on the policy list. Check coverage of the policy, not the presence of a form.
Reusable for
Agencies with paper admission packets and a multifunction scanner.