What is a Medical Record Archive?
A medical record archive is simply a collection of a patient's pertinent medical records. It serves to provide a overview or summary of a patient's past medical and surgical history. The objectives of this information to assist your treating physician in the following areas:
- preventing medication errors
- reducing the need to repeat or duplicate costly labs, x-rays and EKG's and/or medical/surgical procedures
- provide treating physicians with a quick concise lists of a patient's medical/surgical history
- organize many different treating physicians so that they have an understanding of what other physicians have done in the past.
- help to streamline patient care
- provide emergency contact information regarding end-of-life issues
Why not archive everything in my medical record?
The practice of collecting everything in a patient's medical record would lead to hundreds of lab, x-ray, and procedure documents that would quickly become too bulky and cumbersome for a treating physician to effectively utilize.
What are the components of a Medical Record Archive?
After securely accessing a patient's medical record archive, the "face sheet" is first reviewed by a treating physician. This face sheet provides a quick overview of the following:
- past medical history
- past surgical history
- medications
- medication allergies
- emergency contact information
- lists of prior treating physicians and their specialties
- miscellaneous information such as living wills, Jehovah's Witness faith, or history of malignant hyperthermia and other facts that both the patient and archiving physcian deem pertinent.
Next to the face sheet is a set of links that are organized to provide access to view various pertinent documents such as hospital or operative reports etc...
Please see the sample medical record archive link located on the homepage...
To learn more: click here...
