I am a volunteer with an organization called WorldVistA - www.worldvista.org - which works to promote the use of the Department of Veterans Affairs' "VistA", the public domain electronic medical record and hospital management system, outside of the VA. VistA runs on Windows with Cache from Intersystems (it is written in M) and has been ported to Linux, running on GT.M (http://sourceforge.net/projects/sanchez-gtm) . VistA is being adapted by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make it suitable for use in physicians offices and is soon to be released as VistA-Office EHR. VistA has a Food and Drug Administration regulated imaging system, but it is not something suitable for use outside of a major medical center. Thus, there needs to be some software developed for scanning documents for use in physicians offices and small hospitals both in the US and overseas.
All this leads up to my question. We have some volunteers working on developing the software to do that scanning now, and we are looking for a cross platform solution. We feel that using SANE is the logical choice, but we need some help choosing a scanner or group go scanners that can be used from both Windows and Linux and maybe even eventually with OS X as seamlessly as possible using SANE. We would like to choose scanners that have sheet feeders, and ideally, a range of scanners from high speed business to very small business type for no more than a $200. Having scanners that are easy to get running properly is much more important than having a wide range of choices. We would really appreciate some advice. I am not much of a programmer, so the programmers are working on the development part and I am working on trying to get this issue sorted out for them. I would be happy to call anyone in the US or Canada to discuss it if that would be easier than posting an answer here on the list. I know from my end, when people ask me about VistA, it can take a long discussion! I use Skype www.skype.com generally for talking with folks overseas. My email is nancy at anthracite dot com . Thank you all for your consideration and for reading this long post! -- Nancy Anthracite
