Will dental records ever become dental cds?

Answer 1

Other optical storage systems Rewritable optical disk drives

These drives and disks are manufactured in two formats: 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" The disks have maximum capacities of 230 megabytes and 1.3 gigabytes respectively, although this is likely to increase in the future. All modern drives are backwardly compatible and can read disks recorded in older drives. Rewritable drives use one of two different technologies to write to the disks (magneto-optical and phase change).

Optical systems are slower than modern magnetic hard disks but have several advantages over magnetic systems. Most importantly, they have a very large storage capacity and the disks are robust and immune to damage from stray magnetic fields. Many manufacturers of optical systems guarantee the integrity of stored data for 30 years. Although the drives are expensive, the disks are cheap, which makes them ideal if you need to store large amounts of data--for example, for document image processing (DIP) and in a graphics workstation. You can use an unlimited number of disks in a drive and, as they are removable, they can be locked up in a safe overnight for added security against fire or theft. For this reason, they are sometimes used as an alternative to tape based backup systems

WORM drives

WORM drives (write once read many times) are a variant of the rewritable drives described above. The difference is that data cannot be changed once written to the disk. This kind of system has obvious advantages in situations where an audit trail is essential. They are used in several financial institutions but are not commonly found in medical computers, although they have been used in some dental practice systems.

Patient presentations. Some technologically savvy practitioners might present the digital findings to patients in a more sophisticated manner. For example, PowerPoint (Microsoft, Redmond, Wash.) offers templates that allow easy insertion of the examination findings and perhaps the computer-generated simulated treatment expectations. Some offices even set up a consultation room with a liquid-crystal display projector with which to show this plan and then present it to the patient on a compact disc for him or her to take home.

Document image processing (DIP)

Many large organisations have eliminated paper records by using document image processing. All incoming mail is scanned electronically. The text is read by optical character recognition (OCR) software then automatically indexed and stored along with an electronic image of the original document. Anyone permitted access to the system can then rapidly search through every document in the system for a particular word or phrase. Charts and pictures can also be stored and viewed. Several people can access the same document simultaneously. If necessary, the image of the original documents can be laser printed on to paper. The quality is similar to that of a good photocopy. Although there are many advantages in using such a system (not least the elimination of bulky paper records), they raise some unresolved medicolegal issues. The storage requirements for this type of system are so large that optical disks are the only realistic option.

Answer 2

That's funny.

Answer 3

LOL.