Kiosks Feature OCR Card Readers, OCR for Cell Phones and Biometrics to read your hand – Medical Records Input methodologies…

The mobile OCR business is going crazy. You can also with certain vendors use your cell phone with OCR Software. So in addition to a kiosk there’s an option to use OCR on cell phones today. These are great applications for getting patient demographic information into an electronic medical record. BD

Redondo Beach, Calif.-based Seepoint will use card-reading technology from Innovative Card Scanning Inc. in its Kiohealth patient self-serve kiosks. The scanning technology uses optical character recognition to capture an image of a driver's license or insurance ID card and then automatically populate the appropriate demographic fields in a practice management system. Plano, Texas-based Innovative Card Scanning already markets its scanners through agreements with six practice management software vendors. It sells a small scanning device that can be linked to a PC.

This allows mobile devices to have a new kind of application that combines FAST OCR executing on a mobile client device with the ability to send text output to a web server to perform tasks such as translation, searching, and creating contact lists.

One of the most innovative devices that goes beyond scanning is the one that reads your hand.

From a prior post:

Hospitals to use Fujitsu hand scans to register patients - Florida

We may have thought scanning an identification card could really be convenient, this hospital chain will now allow you to check with with the palm of your hand. Video can be seen here.

With all the concern about bacteria in hospitals, this seems to move the mark up one level with no touch required, just hold your hand above the scanner. This could be helpful in expediting information at the Emergency Room level too. This is stated to be more accurate than current fingerprints, but the catch is you need blue veins, well we all have those.