How It Works
Explore
Resources Ask a Question
Who It's For
Patients
Decode results, prep for appointments, weigh options.
Caregivers & advocates
Carry the research load for someone you love.
Providers & clinicians
Resources for patients in your practice.
Log In Ask a Question
Conducting Research

Uploading PDFs, Photos, and Other Files

Drop in a discharge summary, a lab printout, or a photo of a paper note

Not every record comes from a portal. If you have PDFs from your doctor, scanned faxes, photos of handwritten notes, or imaging reports, you can upload them directly into a patient profile.

How to upload

  1. Open the patient profile you want to add records to.
  2. Go to Medical Data.
  3. Click Add Health Data - Upload files.
  4. Drag files into the drop zone or click Select Files to browse.

You can drop multiple files at once. Inciteful Med extracts the text and adds each file to the patient's records.

Supported file types

The upload accepts:

  • PDFs - most discharge summaries, lab reports, and visit notes
  • Images - phone photos and scans of paper records
  • Text files
  • FHIR bundles (.json, .ndjson)
  • C-CDA (.xml, .cda, .ccda)
  • ZIP archives - useful for bulk exports from patient portals

If you drop in a .json, .xml, .cda, .ccda, or .zip file, Inciteful Med detects it as a structured medical record and routes it through the FHIR or C-CDA import wizard automatically - see Importing a FHIR or Apple Health file and Importing a C-CDA file.

File size limit

Each individual file can be up to 100 MB. Larger PDFs need to be split before upload.

Tips for better results

  • Phone photos: hold the phone steady, fill the frame, and avoid shadows. Inciteful Med uses OCR to read text, and clean photos OCR much better.
  • Scanned PDFs: text-based PDFs (the kind where you can highlight and copy text) work best. Image-only scans are OCR'd automatically but quality varies.
  • Multi-page documents: keep them as one PDF - don't split a discharge summary into separate files.
  • Sensitive info: you can delete any record after upload (see Deleting a medical record), but it's safer to redact anything you're sure you don't want before uploading.

After upload

Each file becomes a record in the patient's Records list. Click any record to:

Trouble uploading?

  • "File size exceeds 100 MB limit" - split the PDF and try again.
  • Upload fails repeatedly - try a different browser, or contact us with the file name.
  • iPhone photo (.heic) won't upload - open the photo on your phone, share it as JPEG, and upload that instead. Many systems handle HEIC inconsistently.