Patent ID: 8250026

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a plurality of medical documents from multiple medical providers using disparate formats, wherein the plurality of medical documents include first medical documents in a paper-based format and second medical documents in a structured data-based format, and wherein the structured data format is non-image text data organized by fields and respective values; converting the first medical documents having the paper-based format into images of the first medical documents in an image-based unstructured data-based format; determining a schema, the schema including a plurality of categories determined based on an expected structural content in the first medical documents or second medical documents; determining indices from the plurality of categories to be used for tagging the first medical documents and the second medical documents when converted into the image-based unstructured format based on a review of an organizing principle to which a common set of descriptors can be identified to tag and organize images of the first medical documents and the second medical documents; converting the text data of the second medical documents having the structured data-based format into images for the second medical documents in the image-based unstructured format based on the determined indices, wherein the structured data-based format is removed in the conversion and the content included in each image is determined based on the determined indices applying to the fields and respective values; indexing the images of the first medical documents and the images of the second medical documents in the image-based unstructured format by associating the determined indices based on the schema with the first and second medical documents; storing the images of first medical documents and the second medical documents in the image-based unstructured format with the indices to allow searching of both the first medical documents and the second medical documents together based on a search query; and storing the second medical documents with an active link to view specific data in the structured data based format provided by the second medical documents for enabling access to the structured data.