HIPAA Blog

[ Thursday, August 27, 2020 ]

 

Interesting article highlighting recent actions by several large radiology organizations.  Recent technological advances have made optical character recognition (OCR) (*uh, not that OCR) more pervasive. This is the technology that allows you to search a PDF for a particular word.  OCR wasn't originally smart enough to use on images (the program would spend too much time trying find words in someone's face that it would bog down before it got to "Hello, my name is Bob" on the name tag), but it's gotten better apparently.  

Due to the high unlikelihood that anyone would try to scan images for text, radiologists and others haven't been as careful with where they store and transmit medical images as they are with medical documents.  Now that OCR is available at scale, and can be operated through a search engine, the tiny patient name or other identifier in the corner of an x-ray might be much more easily discoverable. 


Jeff [10:58 AM]

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