Scanned Records

[Butterflyvet]

Good Afternoon! I was told  by Peggy that my treatment records needed to be scanned by the va records management system. The representative also, said it would be the last thing that is needed to make a decision. I had my C&P exam (which was favorable) done a month ago, and it has been almost 6 months since I've filed my claim. I'm still in the "Gathering of Evidence" status. Can someone please give me input on what the "scanned" items would be. I'm hoping it's not because they don't have my medical records, and would have to look through them for evidence. I would imagine that they would have received and viewed them months ago. Everything is quite confusing at this point. I'm not really sure of what happens after the C&P exam is done. Thank you in advance for your help!

[brokensoldier244th]

They are probably digitizing them, not scanning as in looking through.

[vetquest]

I would agree with BrokenSodiler, they use everything online nowadays.  It is a pain waiting but it is just dealing with the VA.

[brokensoldier244th]

Having worked with digitizing records before and storage id much rather they be digital. Ctrl-f search is much easier than reading hundreds of pages and if there is a fire or flood there are always backups.

Edited April 24, 2019 by brokensoldier244th

[Buck52]

I agree brokensoldier244th

I got my C-file in in 2015 and it was digitized  and put on CD

I used the Acrobat Pro  to scan/copy into my lap top

Sure makes it a thousands times  better to find something .

My problem is some things did not get scanned and copy   as it was in light pencil....so I am screwed on some records and medical notes I need.

So this  taught me a lesson to make sure ALL communication with the VA is in Ink or at least dark pencil/or typed.

I could be wrong here but I understand once they scanned all your records  /digitized   they destroy the rest that would not copy.

  put them in a paper shredder.

[brokensoldier244th]

on that I have no idea, but I can see how pencil records from 1985 or something could be a serious problem. When I was in in the 2000s I was in Records (quartermaster) and we were in the process of transferring from paper handbills to UllsG and what not. What a mess. Trying to get records and counts to coincide was a nightmare. 

[Vync]

I work in the field of processing scanned documents and images. If the VA scans the documents to PDF format, they might also utilize optical character recognition (OCR) during the scanning process to collect searchable text. It is far from perfect when scanning handwritten documents (extracted text may come out looking like gibberish). However, if the print quality was good and the characters are very readable (i.e. typed/printed), it usually does a fairly good job extracting searchable text. It might not be 100% perfect if you search or select/copy/paste text. If the VA scans the documents to a bitmap format (i.e. JPG/TIF), which I doubt, it would not be searchable.