Patent US 7,802,183

An electronic record management system utilizes semi-structured documents that contain both authenticated partial texts created by an author and pointers to audio recordings that will be processed later by transcribers. The transcribed material is held in temporary storage until reviewed and approved by the author. When approved, the transcribed text may be combined with the original authenticated partial text to produce a final authenticated document. In addition, the record management system may further include a mechanism for assigning multiple context-dependent meanings to at least a portion of the information items included in a document. The record management system therefore allows a variety of encoding schemes to be automatically overlaid on each document. This creates opportunities to re-use the information for secondary purposes, such as preparing bills (such as Medicare bills) that must conform to arbitrary sets of rules.