Documentation In Nursing Essay

The health record is a collection of information about a patient’s past and present health. The primary purpose of the health record is to document the health history of the patient. It helps in patient care management and patient care support process. Moreover, record’s primary purpose is to get information for billing and reimbursement. The secondary purpose of the health record is to provide a legal record of care given and act as a source of data to support clinical audit, research, resource allocation, performance monitoring, epidemiology and service planning. Sometimes health information will be de-identified before it is used for these secondary

Clinical documentation Improvement (CDI) is the program or the training that is design to provide the good link between coders and health care providers that increase the accuracy and completeness of patient health care documentation. According to American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) tool kit CDI is the program especially design for health care field for initiate concurrent and, as appropriate, retrospective review of patient health records for accurate, incomplete, or nonspecific provider documentation (Scharffenberger and Kuehn 2011). Most of the time patient health record review occur in inpatient location but it there is any confusion then the review can go through electronic health records too. CDI play a vital role solving complex case between coder and health care provider that result in easy and smooth operation of reimbursement process in health care organization for the service they provide to patient.

Record-keeping and documentation are a hugely important part of nursing practice that unfortunately is often overlooked. Good record-keeping is in fact an essential element of being a good nurse. This assignment will discuss the importance of record-keeping in the healthcare setting. Record-keeping is vital for three main functions of nursing. It facilitates communication, promotes safe and appropriate nursing care and meets professional and legal standards (CRNBC 2008). These purposes and other important functions of record-keeping will be described in this assignment. The professional and legal implications of poor record-keeping will also be outlined. The topics will only be briefly and broadly discussed due to word count

Health information is an important source of information and evidence when the services provided are communicated in legal and professional documentation. It is a documentation which is a legal requirement and a record of the beneficiary’ care as well as a communication vehicle between other disciplines and providers. It not only ensures the services provided to individuals but is a crucial tool to support reimbursement of services and a basis for research. Incomplete and improper documentation potentially may lead into a denial of payment for services as well as question’s the quality of care provided.

According to Chtourou (2013), a CDI program focuses on enhancing the accuracy of clinical documentation quality which requires a huge input from CDI specialists, heath information management professionals, coders and clinicians to collaborate together to review the quality of documentation reported/captured in order to ensure accuracy and complete of patient’s clinical encounter. As a healthcare provider, medical records that are incomplete or inaccurate often times, compromise the quality of care reporting and inevitably affect the clinical decision support system of the organization including the accuracy of reimbursement. This is reasonable since the CDI program has emerged as a new paradigm to meet the changing needs of maintaining a sound health record documentation across the healthcare industry (Hauger, 2014). Most of the CDI programs have to a great extent concentrated on boosting the Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRGs) installments by securing clinical documentation to support medical complications and co-morbidities (Hauger, 2014).

Any information utilized in, “documenting healthcare or health status,” of a patient must be included in the designated record set (AHIMA, 2011). This includes patient documentation collected on any medium, such as WAVE files or x-ray images (AHIMA, 2011). Consequently, due to the incorporation of clinical, administrative, and other protected private health information, the designated record set is extremely different from the legal health record (AHIMA,

The value of CDI clinical documentation improvement (CDI) programs are important to any facility that recognizes the requirement of complete and accurate patient documentation. Documentation is very critical because it validates the care that was given. Furthermore, it shares important data to the caregiver and improve claims processing (Leventhal,2014). The three challenges are getting physicians to buy into the program, physicians are extremely busy so they are not connecting the dots on clinical documentation, and training the physicians to get them to understand they need to do better documenting (Leventhal,2014).

The careful documentation and subsequent billing process within the course of a patient’s care is an important piece within the healthcare system as a whole. Proper documentation in a patient’s chart relating to any service or procedure is not only important for this patient’s future medical care, but for the facility to receive an accurate reimbursement for the services provided. Reimbursement is affected by every department within the hospital. Healthcare is a business in the long run, and inaccuracies within the reimbursement process will affect the financial stability of the hospital. If a department is mismanaging reimbursement data it could result

As a biller or coder, if it is not documented, it didn't happen that needs to follow to be able to give an excellent service to every patients. Documentation is the key to have an appropriate health patients result including demographics, health issues, and billing. “Consistent and complete documentation in the medical record for every patient is an essential component of providing quality patient care. This documentation is required to record pertinent facts, observations and findings, and must meet certain compliance standards.” If not documented that is not necessary to give any further diagnosis

Unfortunately, with five medication aides and two managers all doing filing, records often get misplaced, whether they are put in the wrong section of the expand-a-file, filed under the wrong section of a resident’s binder or accidently get deposited into the secure shredding container. The implementation of a new health documentation system would be a marked improvement to the current system.

Documentation records is related to the quality of patient care provided. It signifies the primary communication among multidisciplinary caregivers for efficient and effective intial treatment, for continuing care, and for the evidence that care and treatment occure. Regulatory agencies use the documentation as a means to measure the quality of services before granting accreditation or certification to healthcare organiztions. Some of those agencies include:

The second week of my preceptorship brought many new experiences for me, and I can honestly say that each day I spend with my preceptor is better than the last. This week I focused on time management of a full patient load with continued documentation practice as well as admission and discharge procedures. I’ve had brief experiences in my past rotations assisting with discharge teaching and admission assessments however I have never been able to fully take charge and complete the process from start to finish, so this was a great learning opportunity for me.

Written communication in healthcare system comprises of care plans, daily reports, handover sheets ,medication sheets in general ,(record keeping). These clinical records are essential skills of communication that a nurse should be able to write as well as extracting vital information from which to provide relevant and precise care. This makes continuity of necessary care possible and fulfils one of NMC’s (2008) core principles of the code of working with others to protect and promote the health and wellbeing of those in nurse’s care and obligation to ensure total and effective information is communicated to your colleagues concerning people in your care (NMC 2010). These records help to increase answerability to the part of the nurse if the nurse is aware of this will be more considerate knowing that any mistake will come around. In addition these records help as the basis for decision –making for nurses and multi-disciplinary team of which the nurse

When you look at how nursing documentation affects patient outcomes consider all the benefits of informatics. Electronic charting systems allows for automation in patient safety issues. This automation can be prompts that forces a nurse to address things like abuse history, and many other requirements from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), and if the nurses document, there is a history of abuse, the system can automatically send a referral to a department to follow up on the nurses charting. The clinical systems store valuable information, and re-populates, this information on later admissions. An example of this valuable information, would be a patient with the diagnosis of methicillin-resistant staph

Ineffective nursing documentation compromises patient safety and can result in serious or even fatal errors. Nursing documentation is essential to practice and is defined as everything entered into a patient’s electronic health record or written in a patients’ record (Perry, 2014). The goal of effective nursing documentation to ensure continuity of care, maintain standards and reduce errors (Perry, 2014). Nurses are accountable for their professional practice which requires documentation to effectively reflect the care that clients receive. The College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO) states that nursing being regulated health care professionals are accountable for ensuring that their documentation is accurate and meets the practice standards (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2009). Effective documentation strategies to reduce errors include; documenting in a timely fashion, using correct abbreviations and spelling, correcting documentation errors appropriately and ensuring that handwriting is legible. The purpose of this paper is to explore these strategies in greater detail with the goal of improving the care nurses provide to their clients to enhance safety.