Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Duplicate Charts

I am in major chart clean up mode - is there an easy way to see a report for duplicate charts? Did I miss something obvious for that?

Can you explain exactly what you mean by "duplicate charts"?

A patient who accidently has two charts open. Maybe they were a patient 6 years ago, they come back to care, and the staff at the time don't realize that they had an inactive chart already.

No easy way I have found. One problem with using Caretracker as the PM/Billing is that if an address or something changes for a pt it has to be done in Caretracker and then allowed to update AC. If done in AC first caretracker will make a duplicate chart in AC.

Sabbath I am afraid I don't know any easy way either.

I feel like this needs to be a thing. If your email can easily scan through your contacts and suggest duplicates - surely AC can.

I just don't see it as being a large amount of duplicates. I only notice when a refill comes in and doesn't seem to match or I know I have seen a pt in the past and there is nothing in the chart.

Someone has better control of their charts than I do ;-)

This clinic has a far number of duplicates. It’s an issue.

This may not be what you want to hear, but your efforts may be best spent educating staff about being more careful creating the duplicates going forward.

Oh trust me - that's absolutely happening.

I just individually inactivated (one. at. a. time) 10,000 + patients that hadn't been seen in 48+ months. 10k.

There's a lot of chart clean ups that need to happen.

Wait...what????

I see you are in Des Moines. Population about 200k. You just deactivated charts on 5% of the population.

How many ACTIVE patients do you have?

Pfffft - Des Moines/West Des Moines Metro population is 700k.

And this is going back since 2013. We have 7,750 active patients (patients that have been seen within the last 3 years).

Still... sounds like quite the successful practice. And you have your hands full!

We stay busy, that's for sure! 4 providers, and all the staff to support them. We've got a really great crew!

Lot smaller here and only 3 front office staff so a lot easier to control. WOW 10,000+

No easy way! Duplicates were driving me insane. And our patient population has two last names (hispanic) so if they say the other last name, then a new chart could be created.

One hack is train your staff to ask for the DOB when a patient calls. You can search by DOB in the patient list but this is not a default setting to have the DOB box shown.

The other thing we did is change the workflow on the new patient process so that only 1 person creates new patient charts (excluding newborns but these USUALLY don't result in duplicates).

Sounds like it's time to dig out my de-duplication program that merges patient charts into the one that was created last.

Speaking of patient count, I'm currently converting an Allscripts database with 131,483 patients. The largest AC database I have ever converted is 20,134 patients.

James

Sabbath, can I ask, why do you use AC? I thought only small 1-2 provider offices use AC. With 4 providers, aren't you paying a lot to use a program whose features doesn't match the competition like Athena, ecw, etc.? Or maybe AC is better and I don't know. I've never used other EMR, just heard of what they can do that AC can't. I would love to use a pediatric centric EMR but our 1 provider does not want to learn a new program.

We use it because, if I’m being frank, we are owned by a 75 year old doctor who doesn’t want to completely overhaul the practice in the 5 remaining years he has before he sells the practice.

He simply won’t. We’ve actually tried and NOPE.

I am in the exact same situation. Boomer owner not willing to change. Retirement on the horizon.

Yeah those darn boomers!
Oops.

Haha. I was trying to be discreet about the age but I guess I should have selected a more PC term. Lets just say a older person who is not fond of complicating their lives any more than necessary.

@Sabbath

Should have taken me up on my offer of having SQL IT do it. 10,000 charts inactivated in less than 10 seconds.

No offense taken! I answer to "boomer" as well as "older person who is not fond of complicating their lives any more than necessary".

I prefer dinosaur!

I considered it. But the same “boomer boss” is really nervous about anything IT related that he doesn’t understand. I tried ;-)

For the 1000th time, I am sure a SQL expert or even a SQL super novice could locate all those duplicate charts with one query. In seconds.