[Gnumed-devel] Scanning and adding to the patients' document archive

[Jim Busser]

With my last post as a lead-in, I can envision a variety of workflows for 
scanning/attaching documents:

After a patient record is already in focus:
*******************************************
This is what GNUmed currently supports. The user
- becomes aware of paper that needs to be scanned, or
- becomes aware of an electronic document (maybe blob) that needs importing

In the first of the above two cases, if the scanner is not next to the user, 
the user will need to go for a walk, hope no job is already pending, insert the 
paper, and hope no-one else prematurely activates the scanner. In this case, 
the image could be directly imported into GNUmed without having to have 
separately saved and then (somewhere on a fileshare) browsed around to select 
the file to import.

In the second case, the file that is to be browsed/selected is hopefully 
already checked and sanitized to not contain a page image that either pertains 
to some other patient (which part must not be lost). if on the other hand a 
stray part would represent clinical "detritus" such as some administrative 
memo, it could just be discarded.

As far as which GUI to use to acquire the image file, some discussion suggests 
that Xsane can be overwhelming by offering users too many options. In this 
regard, there also exists

gscan2pdf (perl) but I am not sure whether:
(a) it can be easily invoked from within GNUmed and
(b) having been the controller of SANE, it can pass control of an 
image-in-memory to GNUmed
and whether gscan2pdf is on this basis a non-solution for GNUmed plugin 
scanning.

but there exists also Simple Scan (developed under Ubuntu) written in C, I 
think... would it be interchangeable with Xsane and therefore a viable option 
if Xsane proved confusing and if a miniproject team regarded this as something 
important to them to improve?

-- Jim Busser