Problem: You are an HIM supervisor for Happy Valley Hospital, a 600 bed facility. The Joint Commission requires that all documentation for the medical record is to be completed within 30 days. Happy Valley's rate of compliance with this requirement is 87%. More importantly, this is the second year that Happy Valley's compliance rate is less than the required 100%. The organization's current practice is that a letter is sent to physicians once charts have become delinquent at 30 days post-discharge. Follow-up letters continue weekly, and if charts were not completed, the previous director would call the physician office.
The HIM director has asked that you track the delinquent physicians in an Excel file:
Build a data dictionary using Excel. Consider the following questions as you construct this data dictionary:
- What fields would be included?
- What would the data types be?
- Which fields would be optional? Which ones would be required?
- What descriptions would each field have?
- Which fields would be linked to fields in other databases?
Use at least 12 data elements and enter at least 15 different records.