Glossary of medical chronology software terms
Answer in brief: the words on vendor pages hide real differences. A "page" can be an uploaded page, a deduplicated page or 400 tokens of text; "HIPAA compliant" is a claim, while a BAA is a contract. These definitions say what each term means when you compare products.
Limits: Every product fact comes from the vendor's own website, read on 2026-11-12 and linked in each row. We have not tested these products, and "not published" means we did not find the fact on the pages we read, not that the product lacks it.
Terms about the chronology
- Page citation
- A reference from a chronology entry to the page of the record it came from. The useful kind opens that page in 1 click, inside the app and inside exports.
- Deduplication
- Finding pages that repeat in a record file. Exact duplicates match word for word; near-duplicates differ only in a fax header or print date. Vendors differ on which they catch and whether they bill for them.
- Missing records
- Records the file refers to but doesn't contain, such as an MRI report mentioned in a follow-up visit. Some products list them so you can request them.
- Record set
- The group of records processed together as 1 job. CaseMark prices per record set; others price per case or per page.
- Bates number
- A unique stamp on each page of a document production, used in litigation so that everyone cites the same page the same way.
- OCR
- Optical character recognition: turning scanned images of pages into searchable text. Poor faxes and handwriting are where it fails first.
- Hyperlinked export
- A Word, PDF or HTML file whose citations are live links to the source pages. Check whether the links need a login to the vendor's app.
- Record retrieval
- Requesting records from hospitals, clinics and labs under a signed authorization. A separate job from building the chronology, though some vendors sell both.
Terms about price
- Billable page
- The unit a vendor actually charges for. It can be every uploaded page, only deduplicated pages, or a block of text (Dodonai counts about 400 tokens as 1 page).
- Page allowance
- The number of pages a monthly plan includes before overage rates apply, as with MediScan's $169 plan for 1,200 pages.
- Credit
- A prepaid unit spent on processing. At Medrecords AI 1 credit is 1 page; at Dodonai, processes use 1 to 3 credits per billable page.
Terms about security
- BAA
- Business associate agreement: the HIPAA contract a covered entity, such as a physician practice or hospital, signs with a vendor that handles its patients' health information.
- SOC 2 Type I and Type II
- Audit reports on a vendor's security controls. Type I checks the design on 1 date; Type II tests that controls worked over a period. Ask which systems the report covers.
- HITRUST
- A healthcare security certification built on a large control framework. The r2 level is the most demanding. LongHealth states it holds r2.
- PHI
- Protected health information: health data that identifies a patient. Every medical record file is full of it.
Terms about who reads the output
- IME
- Independent medical examination: an exam and report by a physician who is not treating the patient, usually for an insurer, employer or court.
- QME
- Qualified medical evaluator: a physician certified by California's Division of Workers' Compensation to examine injured workers in disputed claims.
- Standard-of-care review
- A physician's review of whether care met the accepted standard, for peer review, hospital risk management or a malpractice claim. Timing and late entries matter most here.