Ensuring Quality Throughout the Evolution of Clinical Documentation

Throughout my HIM career, I have seen many different methods of capturing clinical documentation. We are always looking for solutions to get accurate and complete clinical documentation into the medical record in a timely manner with minimal disruption to the provision of care. The processes for gathering documentation have evolved with advances in technology and HIM professionals have been very involved in ensuring the quality of the documentation.

When I first began working in an HIM department, we had a Transcription department with hospital-employed transcriptionists and a management team devoted to medical transcription. Quality reviews were performed regularly and the transcriptionists had an ongoing relationship with the physicians to provide feedback and get clarifications. As part of this department, there were file clerks in charge of filing the transcribed documents onto the paper medical records throughout the day and into the night. When I think back on these practices, it seems like an entirely different lifetime from today’s practices yet it really wasn’t that long ago.

Over time, transcriptionists began to disappear from hospitals as the task became outsourced. Vendors have offered to do the job for less cost and they guaranteed a high quality rating of the transcribed reports. However, transcribed reports often still come back to the medical record with blanks and anomalies that must be corrected by the dictating clinician which can delay the documentation reaching the chart. It’s important to review documents to make sure there are no obvious errors that may have been misinterpreted by the transcriptionist or the back-end speech recognition system.

Many are still relying on outsourced transcription as a major source of capturing documentation but this is evolving as EHRs have created new opportunities for documentation. EHRs provide documentation tools such as templates to import data into the notes and allow for partial dictation for the narrative description. The negative side of this is that copy and paste is used frequently due to the ease of grabbing documentation from the rest of the EHR and pasting it into the note to save time. Clinicians using copy and paste may not realize that the information could be outdated or it could be against company policies. This now requires quality reviews to monitor the use of copy and paste and the relevance of the documentation to maintain the integrity of the medical record. This should be incorporated into chart audits or other quality review processes.

Front-end speech recognition tools are popping up frequently as an additional tool to capture documentation. A concern with this is the shift from having quality reviews performed by the transcriptionist to now relying on the clinicians to edit their documentation as they dictate. Many are creating positions in HIM departments to perform quality reviews on the documentation to not only ensure the documentation is in the record in the adequate timeframe but making sure the documentation is accurate for each patient. It will be interesting to see how clinical documentation continues to evolve as new methods of capturing documentation are developed and deployed. No matter how the information gets into the medical record, HIM professionals still have the ultimate responsibility to ensure the quality of the documentation for patient care and appropriate reimbursement.

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About the author

Erin Head

Erin Head is the Director of Health Information Management (HIM) and Quality for an acute care hospital in Titusville, FL. She is a renowned speaker on a variety of healthcare and social media topics and currently serves as CCHIIM Commissioner for AHIMA. She is heavily involved in many HIM and HIT initiatives such as information governance, health data analytics, and ICD-10 advocacy. She is active on social media on Twitter @ErinHead_HIM and LinkedIn. Subscribe to Erin's latest HIM Scene posts here.

   

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