Fujitsu Fi scanners are the best in the market but....

[ericksonjustin]

I'm an IT professional and I have been supporting and installing small business networks for medical offices now for more than 6 years now. Every medical office I support, of course, has a high demand for scanning medical documents and I have worked with several types of scanners on the market made by different manufacturers (Xerox, Panasonic, Canon, Epson, etc) and I have to say that Fujitsu scanners are definitely the best in the market. They are recommended by all of the top EHR software vendors in the market because they are the most rock solid, fast, compact, and feature rich scanners on the market. All of the original Fujitsu Fi-5120c scanners that I installed more than 6 years ago are all still running beautifully and have all scanned more than 85,000 documents. They are small, fast, scan duplex with one pass, automatically scan duplex and remove the blank side, auto crop, automatically straighten pages, scan id and insurance cards, have ocr features, and I have never seen one double feed or jam once unless there was a sticky note or user error. I could go on. My issue is that the advance features of the twain drivers for the Fi series of scanners are not usable with Open Dental, which I have just started to work with. Open Dental doesn't allow the twain driver to automatically strip blank pages, auto crop, auto straighten, etc. The twain driver states that the software calling the driver does not allow these features to be enabled. I have seen many mentions of the ScanSnap Fujitsu scanners in the forums here which are also great scanners, but that is the line of scanners that Fujitsu puts out that only supports scanning to proprietary software and do not have twain or isis drivers for marketing reasons. Those scanners are for business offices that are just trying to archive paper documents into searchable PDF's. The commercial line up of scanners from Fujitsu are the Fi series and they do have twain drivers, great twain drivers, and are the scanners meant to work with commercial software, like Open Dental, directly. The Fujitsu Fi-6130z is more expensive than a lot of scanners on the market. It runs about $850, however they are worth every penny. They keep staff productive and happy and will not require any replacing or fuss. However, the only way I have managed to use these scanners with Open Dental and utilize the great auto features is by using the import button on the image screen. The user has to use another program that uses the twain driver to scan the document into a network share and then import it into Open Dental. This is a lot of steps, when if Open Dental were developed to better utilize the twain driver, it could be a one click task with default settings that work with most scanning jobs. Put the paper in click scan, bam, done. Hand the id and insurance card back to the patient and tell them that you will be right with them and they can have a seat.

The Fi series of scanners from Fujitsu are the best scanners on the market and really should be on the top of the list of supported scanners. http://opendental.com/manual/scanners.html Don't take it from me, read reviews of these scanners and pay attention the next time you go to any major hospital, you will see them all over the place because the big dog EHR software vendors have tested all of the scanners out there and they are the best in the market and make help make EHR software look awesome and be fast to use. I really hope this post helps get the developers interested in looking into these scanners and refining the use of twain drivers so OD works with them to fullest level. By the way, to the developers listening, Fujitsu's tech support for these scanners is not bad at all and I would be surprised if the wouldn't be willing to go the extra mile to help you develop the right calls to the twain drivers.

Anybody else that has experience with these scanners, please add your comments. I really love to see Open Dental excel because of its sense of community. It is quite admirable and proof of why open source can be better. Keep it up.

[ericksonjustin]

I thought I would add what would be a simple improvement. A big improvement would be in the image section, when clicking on the multi-page scan button, you can have the default scanner already set with twain settings already saved to scan duplex, auto size, auto rotate, and blank page removal. There are more features that could be utilized, but that is a real good start. That way somebody scanning one page or 50 pages, could just put the paper in the scanner, hit the multi-page scan button and it immediately starts scanning documents of any size, automatically scans double-sided only when needed, and finishes without any more clicks. Adjustments for DPI and color right next to the scan button would be good too for id's or photos, but that isn't as big of a concern.

[deedplot]

I do know the S1500 Fujitsu Scanners do not allow twain interaction. They force you to scan with their own software,usually to a PDF or JPG and then you have to manually import the document into your software. This is the case with Softdent and probably most other practice management software.

My experience with OD is that most twain compliant drivers work. They use a addon from EZTwain pro which is a excellent developer package.

[ericksonjustin]

The S1500 is a ScanSnap Fujitsu scanner and is part of the ScanSnap model line from Fujitsu that only works with bundled software. They are cheaper and designed that way for marketing reasons. The Fi series is the line up of scanners from Fujitsu that is intended for commercial environments, such as dental offices, and fully support twain, isis, and kofax drivers. The Fi-6130z works with Open Dental but many of the auto-sizing, auto-blank page skip, and auto straighten features of the twain driver are not allowed by Open Dental. The biggest problem is the auto-sizing isn't supported. I'm not a developer so I'm not one to get into a debate of whether or not the auto-sizing should work or not because the developers did what they are supposed to do. I just see that there is a confusion that Fujitsu scanners don't support twain drivers, when on the contrary, they have some of the most advance twain drivers I've seen on the market. Only the ScanSnap scanners that start with "S" don't have twain drivers. All of the EHR software I have seen that recommend Fi scanners have had the fastest and most efficient scanning methods. It seems like the developers of Open Dental were using Epson scanners in the testing bed and made sure it worked well with those scanners because they weren't aware that Fujitsu made twain supported scanners. So I just wanted to shine a light on the Fi Fujitsu scanners since I have found them to be such great scanners.

Anyhow, I have figured out how to make it work well enough by using the import method and even though it isn't as smooth of a process as I think it could be, the users still prefer it over the Epson or Brother scanners they have because it is faster, smaller, and jams less often.

For anybody curious:
We have the Fi-6130z connected through USB. We are using the ScanAll Pro twain scanning software that comes bundled with the scanner. I created batch scan settings and assigned hot keys for each batch scan profile. ctrl+shft+D is for general documents and insurance cards and scans black and white in duplex, automatically resizes each page, removes blank pages, and auto straightens. ctrl+shft+i is for photo id's and scans to jpeg in color, one-sided, auto resizes, and auto-straightens. ctrl+shft+x scans with all of the contrast, dpi, and brightness settings that I found work well enough to scan x-rays in a transparency envelope. So what the user has to do is load the scanner, hit the hot key, click on the import button in Open Dental, and grab the new file. Every once and awhile they go in and purge all of the files that accumulate in the network share where the batch scan sends the documents to be imported. Saved the sanity of the main front desk person that works her tail off.

[KevinVan]

I hope the OD developers reads this and get this thing going. I have 15 filing cabinets worth of charts I want to get rid of.

kevin

[Justin Shafer]

I don't know if OD is still using the ez-twain interface, but I imagine it would not be hard to test changing up the code and testing to see how well it works with the Fujitsu Twain driver....

that is interesting though.. the fujitsu has the ability to remove blank pages in the twain driver itself, before it pushes the images to Open Dental. I usually use a threshold of 2 or 3... So I guess your saying those options are grayed out???

Most of my OD clients use the ScanSnap. But I do have one that has the Fujitsu fi-5120c. I tweaked OD for him.. He liked it, but realized it only saved a click or two for the user. Then decided the staff could manage very easily, in fact. So I never played with it after that.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=561

Have a look at that code, and see what is new.. as that was with Open Dental 5.x.. I imagine a lot has changed... I am not a programmer.. just an fyi.

[Justin Shafer]

doh

[Justin Shafer]

If you would like some help give me a shout.. I just need access to you scanner.. I haven't messed with this in.. 5 years.. It would be fun. My current project is.. trying to run open webos on my phone.. Dead operating system.

Perhaps jordan will implement your fix, or compile a binary for you.. As what I compile lacks the ada forms built into open dental as that is copyrighted.

https://github.com/tdmiller/ODental/tre ... OpenDental

looks like someone created a fork.
https://github.com/tdmiller/ODental/blo ... EZTwain.cs

That file looks important.

Github would be a great place for Open Dental. Sort of... I haven't figured out how to push a commit yet and keep the comments the same.. noob.