Adobe Healthcare Blog

PDF is certainly a broad universe, but the Healthcare industry has some specific needs, especially in regards to data exchange.

PDF Healthcare, is a relatively new, Best Practices guide for using PDF in the Healthcare industry.

The PDF Healthcare guidance was authored by AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management.

AIIM is a non-profit industry group focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes.

AIIM offers a number of very useful PDF Healthcare Resources on their site including:

• FAQs
• PDF Healthcare Implementation Guide
• Sample Files, including XML-based PDF health data interchange forms
• Presentations and Testimonials

. . . and many others.

Read on to learn about the many different resources available on the AIIM PDF Healthcare site.

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Here are the slides which correspond to my “Acrobat for Healthcare Professionals eSeminar”.

All the links in the slide set are active in the downloadable PDF.

You can download the slides directly from the link below, or preview the slides in the Acrobat.com window.

Acrobat_9_Healthcare.pdf (620K PDF)

In my last article, Patient Information Forms: Making Patients Happy, I discussed my frustration with the entire paper-based Patient Information Form Process.

The frustration is fresh on my mind since I ran into the same problem today trying to schedule an appointment for my son today. My son is in school at California State University and I have to fill in forms for him here in Illinois. The receptionist couldn’t even fax me the forms since " . . . the pages are dark and they don’t fax well."

Aargh!

In this introductory article you’ll learn how to:

• Create a form
• Add or edit fields
• Add buttons so that patients can email the form to you
• Save the form and enable it for your patients who use the free Adobe Reader software

Acrobat Forms Basics

Using Acrobat 9, you can create a form that is fillable for your patients who are using an earlier version of the free Adobe Reader. Adobe has distributed almost a billion copies of the free Adobe Reader, so it is very unlikely that your patient won’t be able to fill out the document.

Architecturally, the form fields "live" in a layer on top of the base document.

The basic steps to create a form are:

1. Find your form
   • If the form is on paper, scan it in. You can do that directly in Acrobat
   • Locate your existing Word, Excel, etc. form file
2. Use Acrobat to auto-recognize form fields on the document
3. Add, delete fields as necessary
4. Test the form

To make it easy to try this yourself, I’ve you can download the "flat" and completed forms below.

Before Form – No fields (14K PDF)
Form with Fillable Fields, Reader Enabled (193K PDF)

Read on to learn how to do it yourself!

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