Q. We are scanning hospital and consultant letters into the practice software system. Should we use optical character recognition (OCR) to view the letters as text?

A. There is a GPIT impact statement on scanning available from the GPIT website. Go to www.gpit.ie and navigate to 'Publications & Reports'. Here is what the document has to say on OCR: "A scanned document is an image or electronic photograph of the original. File types such as Tag Image File Format (TIFF) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) are acceptable for image files. Sometimes the process goes a step further and optical character recognition (OCR) is used to convert the image to text. Optical character recognition is not 100% accurate. The gold standard for scanned documents is the image file. OCR without storage of the original image is not acceptable." So it is OK to do OCR on the scanned letter, but you need to also keep the image file as part of the patient record.