Most people’s medical history lives in a drawer, a plastic sleeve, and two or three email accounts. Discharge summaries, pathology printouts on paper that has started to fade, a manila envelope with an X-ray film in it, a CD from a radiology practice that no computer in the house can read any more, and a stack of specialist letters addressed to a GP you no longer see.
Getting that into a usable state is a real chore, and it is worth being honest that it takes a weekend rather than an hour. But it is a chore with a clear order of operations, and doing it in the right order saves most of the work. This is that order.
Disclosure before we start: I founded exora, which is software for exactly this problem, and it appears once near the end. Everything before that works regardless of what you use, including nothing at all.
Step 1: work out what you are missing before you scan anything
The instinct is to start scanning the pile in front of you. Resist it for an hour, because the pile is not the record - it is whatever happened to survive.
Write a rough timeline instead. Every GP practice you have been a patient of, with approximate years. Every hospital admission. Every specialist. The pathology companies whose names appear on your results. Imaging practices. Physiotherapists, dentists, optometrists, psychologists. Do not aim for completeness on the first pass - aim to notice the gaps, because those are what you will be requesting in step 2, and requests take weeks.
Start the requests first, then scan the pile while you wait. Sequencing it the other way costs you a month.
Step 2: request the records you do not have
You have a legal right to your health information, and it is stronger than most people realise. Under the Australian Privacy Act, any organisation that holds health information about you must give you access to it on request.
Three practical details from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner that make the difference between an easy request and a frustrating one:
- Thirty days is the benchmark. The OAIC’s guidance on APP 12 is that a reasonable period for responding should not exceed 30 calendar days, counted from the day after the request is received.
- They cannot charge you for asking. A provider must not charge you for making a request. They may charge for giving access - photocopying, administration - provided the charge is not excessive.
- Ask for the format you actually want. Access must be given in the manner you request unless that is unreasonable or impracticable. So ask explicitly for electronic copies, as PDFs, by email or on a USB drive. If you do not specify, you will often get paper, and then you are scanning it yourself.
A request can be a short email. Name yourself, your date of birth, the period you want, and ask for a complete copy of your records in electronic form. There is more detail on the process in your health data rights in Australia.
Step 3: sort before you scan
This is the step that saves the most time and the one most people skip.
Sort the physical pile into piles - one per person if you are doing a family, then roughly chronological within each. Do not try to sort perfectly. You are aiming for “1990s, 2000s, 2010s, recent” rather than exact dates, because you are about to put dates in filenames anyway and the computer will do the fine sorting for free.
Two things to pull out into their own piles as you go. Anything where multiple pages belong to one document - a six-page discharge summary is one document, not six scans. And anything fading. Old pathology and pharmacy printouts on thermal paper lose contrast over time and eventually go blank; those are the pages with a deadline on them, so scan them first.
Step 4: scanning settings that actually matter
Ignore most of what scanner software offers. Four settings matter.
Resolution: 300 dpi. This is the long-established norm for text documents, and it is what the National Archives of Australia sets as the minimum in its digitisation specifications for paper records - 300 dpi, greyscale, with OCR encouraged - and what it uses for the access images in its own public records system. Higher is not better for a typed page - it produces much larger files with no gain in readability. Archives reserve higher resolutions and uncompressed preservation formats for irreplaceable originals, which your GP’s referral letter is not. If a document has fine handwriting or faint detail, 400 dpi is a reasonable step up. Below 200 dpi, text recognition starts to fail.
Colour: greyscale for typed pages, colour where colour carries meaning. Most clinical documents are black text on white and greyscale is fine. Scan in colour when there is a coloured chart, a highlighted abnormal result, a stamp or a signature that matters.
Format: PDF, one file per document, with text recognition on. Not JPEG - a multi-page document should be one multi-page PDF. Turn on OCR (optical character recognition), which is the feature that turns a picture of text into text you can search. The National Archives recommends OCR for exactly this reason, and it is the difference between a folder you can search and a folder of images you have to open one by one. If your software offers PDF/A, use it; it is the archival variant designed to still open in twenty years.
Deskew and auto-crop: on. Straight, cropped pages read better and OCR more accurately.
Phone or flatbed?
A phone is genuinely fine for most of this, and a phone you will actually use beats a scanner you will not. Use your phone’s document scanning mode rather than the plain camera - it detects edges, flattens perspective, and outputs a multi-page PDF. Then: flat surface, page pressed flat, even light from the side rather than overhead, and your own shadow out of the frame. Avoid the flash, which produces a hotspot on glossy paper.
A flatbed is worth it if you have hundreds of pages, or anything fragile, creased or double-sided. A sheet-fed scanner is faster still but will eat a fragile page, so hand-feed anything old.
Step 5: the imaging problem
Imaging is where people get stuck, and it needs unpicking because there are two different things in that envelope.
There is the report - the radiologist’s written findings - and there are the images themselves. For most purposes, including handing your history to a new specialist, the report is the part that carries the information. It is a text document; scan it like anything else. Do that first, because it is easy and it is most of the value.
The images are a different matter. Medical images are stored in a format called DICOM, and a disc from a radiology practice is almost always a DICOM CD rather than a folder of ordinary pictures. Some discs include a small viewer program; many now do not, and increasingly no computer in the house has an optical drive anyway.
Practical options, in the order I would try them:
- Ring the practice and ask what online access they offer. Many Australian radiology providers now have an online viewing platform, and can give you or your specialist access without a disc at all. Access arrangements vary a lot between practices, so this is a phone call rather than something you can look up. Ask while you are on the phone whether they can send the images as a download.
- Ask for another copy. Practices can generally produce a replacement disc or a USB drive. You may need photo ID and there may be a small fee.
- Borrow or buy an external USB optical drive if you have discs and no way to read them. They are inexpensive, and copying the disc contents onto a normal folder on your computer preserves them regardless of whether you can view them.
- Keep the DICOM files even if you cannot open them. They are the diagnostic-quality original. A radiologist or specialist can read them; a screenshot of a viewer cannot substitute.
Old X-ray films - the large transparent sheets - can be photographed against a bright even light source, such as a window on an overcast day or a lightbox. Understand what you are getting: a photograph of a film is a record that the study exists and roughly what it showed. It is not diagnostic quality and no clinician will read it as such. The written report matters more.
Step 6: name files so you can find them later
One convention, applied consistently, and the problem is solved permanently. Put the date first, in year-month-day order:
2019-03-14_RoyalMelbourne_DischargeSummary.pdf
2019-03-16_Melbourne-Pathology_FullBloodCount.pdf
2021-11-02_Dr-Nguyen_CardiologyLetter.pdf
Date-first in YYYY-MM-DD order is the whole trick: it sorts chronologically on its own, in every operating system, forever. Writing 14-03-2019 does not. Use the date on the document - the date of the consultation or the test - not the date you scanned it.
Keep folders shallow. A folder per person, and inside it either one folder per year or one folder per document type. Deep nesting feels organised and makes things harder to find. If you are unsure which folder something belongs in, that is a sign you have too many folders.
Step 7: back it up before you relax
You have just spent a weekend creating something that exists in one place. If that place is a laptop, you have one copy, and one copy is not a record.
The commonly recommended approach is the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of the data, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy somewhere else. In practice, for a household, that usually means the folder on your computer, a copy on an external drive, and a copy in a cloud service. The off-site copy is the one that survives a house fire or a theft, which are the events that actually destroy family records.
Two additions specific to health information. Choose cloud storage you are comfortable holding sensitive personal information, and turn on two-factor authentication for that account. And test it once - open a file from the backup rather than assuming the backup works. Untested backups fail surprisingly often.
What to keep on paper
Do not shred as you scan. A few sensible rules:
- Keep anything you might need to physically present. Immunisation records, particularly for school enrolment or travel, and anything with an official stamp or seal.
- Keep anything you cannot request again. If the practice has closed, the doctor has retired, or the document came from overseas, that piece of paper may be the only copy in existence. Providers are only required to keep records for a limited period, and older records do get destroyed.
- Keep the DICOM discs until the files are safely copied and backed up somewhere you have verified.
- You can be relaxed about routine duplicates - a pathology result whose provider still exists and still holds it.
A single archive box in a cupboard, labelled, is the right amount of effort for the paper you are keeping.
The step people skip: making it usable
Here is the honest limitation of everything above. When you finish, you have a well-named, searchable, backed-up folder of PDFs. That is a genuine achievement and it is far better than a drawer.
It is still not a health record. Searching for “cholesterol” gets you eleven documents; it does not get you your cholesterol trended over eleven years. Your medications are named differently by different providers, generic in one letter and brand in another. The question “when did this actually start” still means opening documents and reading them side by side. Text search finds words, and a health record is about facts and dates and how they relate.
Closing that gap is either patient work - building your own summary document and maintaining it, which plenty of people do and which is genuinely worth the effort - or it is software.
That is what exora does: you upload the PDFs you have just made, and it reads them, extracts the conditions, medications, results, procedures, allergies and immunisations, and assembles them into one searchable record with a timeline. Every fact links back to the page and line of the document it came from, so you can check any of it. It is free, it works on iOS, Android and web, and data is stored in Sydney. It does not diagnose anything or give medical advice - it organises what you already have. If you want to see how it compares with the other options, including the free government ones, there is a wider comparison here.
Whatever you do with the folder afterwards, the folder is the valuable part, and it is yours regardless.
The short version
- Map your providers and notice the gaps.
- Request the missing records in writing, asking for electronic copies. Expect around 30 days.
- Sort the pile roughly by person and period. Scan fading thermal paper first.
- Scan at 300 dpi, greyscale for text, one multi-page PDF per document, OCR on.
- Scan imaging reports as documents. Ring the practice about online access for the images themselves, and keep the DICOM files.
- Name everything YYYY-MM-DD_Provider_Type. Keep folders shallow.
- Three copies, two kinds of storage, one off-site. Then test it.
If something you read while doing this concerns you, take it to a GP rather than to the internet. Sorting out your records is administrative work; interpreting them is not.
Access rights and timeframes are sourced to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s APP 12 guidelines, and scanning resolution guidance to the National Archives of Australia’s published digitisation practice, both linked inline and checked on 30 July 2026. Radiology access arrangements vary between practices and are not standardised; treat the imaging section as a starting point for a phone call. This article is general information, not medical or legal advice.
