If you’re someone who has to go regularly get medical services done or have someone in your family that does, you’ll want to make sure that you can keep your medical records all organized so you can easily get to them when needed. Without having your medical records organized, you can end up being blocked from getting a certain procedure done if a hospital doesn’t have the record needed on-hand for example. To ensure that you can keep your records as neatly as possible, look into how you can use electronic record keeping.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are typically known by many as what you use to complete work in an office setting. However, spreadsheets can also be great when you want to have a basic level of healthcare document management. To use spreadsheets correctly, you’ll want to first create a spreadsheet for each type of document you’re going to use such as general medical, vision, etc. From there, fill out each spreadsheet with a basic level of information on each document you have in your collection so that you can quickly find which ones you need to bring with you. Make sure that you use spreadsheets when you are looking to be more organized with your medical records.
Many people decide to have separate email addresses for different purposes, such as having one for business and the other for everyday messages. Another purpose you should think about is for medical conversations if you’re having them regularly so you can complete record-keeping better. To do this, create a new email and switch over the email address on each website of the medical practices you’re attending. From there, you can filter all of the emails from different practices into folders so you can easily peak in them in the future when you want to see all of the conversations you had with a certain practice. Additionally, most email services have an archiving feature in which you’ll be able to download the emails to save offline, so consider doing that if you want to have all of your records offline. Follow this advice by strongly considering using a new email address when you want to manage your electronic records better.
PDFs
As much as medical practices like to function using electronic documents, you may still have plenty of important documents that are only available to you via paper format. While you could keep all of these in different physical folders, having them available electronically means that you don’t need to worry about losing them, plus you can make them accessible wherever you are if you are willing to put them online. To get your paper documents available electronically, either buy a scanner for yourself or go somewhere that has a scanner to use in which then you’ll be able to simply put all of your files on a USB drive. Once you know what scanner you’re going to use, slowly go through and create PDFs of every paper document that you have. The reason why you want to go with PDFs is that they are a universal format when you want to send documents to any professional, plus you can get them in a much more high-quality format than using picture files, for example. From there, you can simply put your PDFs in different folders that are linked to your spreadsheet for easy usage.
Whether you incorporate one or all of these ideas into electronic record keeping, you’ll be much better off than using paper records only. Always look into new technologies being created to make yourself more organized in the future as these processes will only get faster and easier. Make sure that you are keeping your electronic records updated every time you get new documents, plus think about putting backups somewhere online in case you have to deal with your hard drives getting wiped from any type of issue that can pop up.
