Trying to come up with a solution for a problem at work. PDF seems like a constant hassle.

I recently started working at a university, and we run clinical encounter simulations. One of the things we manage are simulated patient charts that include patient info, medication orders, medication administration records, order forms, etc.

Source documents are paper copies we have been provided to us by various hospitals over the years. In some cases we simply hand write new documents by hand. In some cases we have scanned the documents and where possible, have created input fields, so that when we need to adjust scenarios or create new scenarios / add additional copies of pages, it should hopefully be easier to accomplish because we no longer need to write out pages by hand anymore.

The problem is that we constantly need to update literally hundreds of fields every time we create / update a document if we want to insert it into an existing chart. Example would be a new doctor order. We have our template, but all field names need to be changed otherwise they will populate with existing information.

Adobe provides no tool for automating this, and the only solution I’ve come across is some random person here that is selling access to a javascript file they have created.

One workaround is making every page a separate PDF and enclosing them in a PDF portfolio, but then we’re locked into using Adobe because nothing else seems to support portfolios.

Is there a better document format that I should be storing our template documents in other than PDF? Something that I can straight scan from a printer into a document.

I can’t create new template documents by hand as there are literally hundreds of different documents with hundreds of fields per page.

PDF however seems to be completely useless for our needs and I can’t think of a reasonable solution. Renaming fields before inserting pages seems to be the best option and it’s so frustrating and time consuming.

Does anyone have ANY ideas for how I can manage this?