Health Care providers are embracing electronic document usage more and more, especially in the light of legislation such as HIPAA in the United States. Despite this, patient facing documents such as consent forms for medical procedures are still administrated using paper and pen.
Paper signed records often require great efforts for location and retrieval as health care facilities need to administrate parallel archives for the same patient: (a) the electronic archive with the documentation generated from the various procedures during the patient's visits to the facility and (b) the paper archive with the forms bearing the ink signature of the same patient.
Legally valid electronically signed records lead to a unified record storage system as they can now be stored along with the rest of the electronically generated patient information.
