We have all been there. That moment when you think you have all the answers. You’ve identified every potential problem, and created a plan to prevent them.
Yet when the moment of truth comes, something thought to be as simple as night and day doesn’t go to plan and ends up derailing all of your hard work.
Does this sound familiar?
These things can happen. A function that can be derailed in HIM departments is the process of indexing medical records, especially when this is done manually. This makes it even more important to stay aware of three common, but often overlooked, challenges.
3 Common Medical Record Indexing Challenges
- Fatigue – It’s highly likely that not everyone in your department is getting the recommended hours of sleep per night. Fatigue affects the ability to think clearly, which can cause inaccurate document classification, or typos when keying account numbers.
- Distraction – Departments with a high number of staff can be distracting for anyone. Between phones ringing, and background conversations, even the most experienced HIM professional can have difficulty focusing on assigning a document to the correct patient chart.
- Multi-tasking – This challenge is commonly looked at as a way to boost productivity, however, it can actually be a detriment to work performance. Multi-tasking is actually just the process of switching between tasks, which can slow down production, and cause mental distraction for staff. The negative effects of this challenge can be delays in getting complete patient charts in front of physicians, or misfiled electronic charts.
One way to decrease the likelihood of these instances affecting your HIM department is to leverage document classification tools that automatically index scanned patient records to the correct chart. With this technology, each scanned image can be quality checked for accuracy by trained HIM staff before being returned to your hospital’s EHR.
The result can be a more accurate and complete patient record, as well as quicker turnaround on scanned images getting to your hospital’s healthcare providers.
