Question about digitizing documents

[frozentundra123456]

Hi everyone, not sure if this is the best forum, but I have a question regarding scanning and digitizing a series of patient records.

We just finished a research study of a natural food supplement, and we have paper records for every subject. There were around 1100 subjects, and each subject's record is 100 to 200 pages. Some of the pages are single sided and some are double sided. We want to convert these records to digital form and archive them, with a final size not to exceed a few gb for all the records.

Does anyone have a good suggestion about how to do this? We are looking for something like a high capacity scanner that we can rent or buy (preferably rent) to do this job. We would like to find something to rent from a local outlet or from an online store like Amazon or Newegg. Privacy concerns (and probably cost as well) prevent us from contracting out the job to someone outside the study. We are located in a large metropolitan area.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

A high capacity scanner to do it yourself would be a couple thousand dollars.

Third party document services contractors handle sensitive data all the time - I wouldn't worry about it.

For 200,000 pages, you'd probably be looking at <$0.10 a page to outsource - probably cheaper than buying a scanner and hiring a decent document guy for 6 months.

Seriously, please consider outsourcing.

If you just can't, well, okay - you're probably looking at $2-3k for a decent networked sheet fed ADF B&W scanner if you buy one, you'll want one with a service contract, you'll need a NAS of some kind (a cheap Synology will work fine) for the scanner to dump files, and you'll need a computer with Adobe Acrobat Professional to do final document cleanup. (Deskew, noise reduction, file optimization, OCR for searchability and indexing.)

I'd be surprised if you didn't have a spare computer or room for a cheap NAS in the budget, but you might be better off leasing the scanner from an outfit like IKON or Canon Business Solutions.

Assume about 60kb per page for 300DPI B&W Letter/A4 size pages and ~4x that if you scan at 600dpi (which you should.) So, around 45GB total.