LNCtips.com: Electronic Medical Record Indexing

Like you, most of the medical records that I review are now in electronic format.  And like you, I review every page of the records to obtain the information I need to help attorneys.  However, as the case progresses, I often need to search for a particular treater's documentation or a specific term in the medical records.  With electronic medical records that are thousands of pages long, those focused searches used to take me hours. Since I learned how to index electronic medical records, it now only takes me a minute or two.  Here's how I electronically index medical records.

To index electronic medical records, you'll need to use Adobe Acrobat Pro, Standard, or DC. Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn't have the capability to index electronic documents.  Here are the steps you'll need to take.

1) If your medical records have searchable text, as mine usually do, skip to step two; creating your index will take you just a few minutes. If your document doesn't have searchable text, do a Google search for directions to create searchable text, using key words with the name of your Acrobat version (Pro, Standard, DC).  Also, add the term "OCR" (for older versions of Acrobat) or "recognize text" for Acrobat DC. Once you start the process, grab a snack or go to sleep because it's a very long process for large files. Remember to save the document after the process is over.

2) Next, with your electronic document open, hold the Ctrl, Shift, and F keys down at the same time (CMD, Shift, and F for Macs).  A search box will appear that looks like this:

3) Enter the name or term into the search box and press Search.  As you can see in the image below, this search for the term "trauma" produced 54 results.

That's it!  You can mouse over or click on each entry to locate the specific pages you need. You can tag a hard copy of the medical records or bookmark (Ctrl and B or CMD and B on Macs) the indexed pages.

...Katy Jones