You may have seen a nurse or a doctor looking through the medical transcripts of your previous diagnosis before they appointed you. That’s a part of the systematic procedure known as pre-charting. Pre-charting is when your doctor looks through your chart notes before actually seeing you. Many healthcare practitioners, like nurses and doctors, find it useful to review your previous medical reports, lab results, or previous hospital discharge summaries before they diagnose you.
The steps of pre-charting involve the process after the diagnosis. This article walks you through some of the ways in which pre-charting services helps improve workflow within healthcare spaces.
What makes pre-chatting so efficient?
There are a few ways in which the process of evaluating a patient’s medical summary before diagnosing them is beneficial. Here are some specific cases.
Patient monitoring
Pre-charting makes it accessible for doctors, nurses, and all medical professionals to record the summaries of patients and keep information archived more accurately for diagnosis. It also creates more accurate billings and claims for the different procedures, medicines, etc, because of the way the data is archived. This can be accessed by all healthcare professionals as well as patients involved in the hospital’s management system.
Speeding up consultations
Pre-charting enhances remote data collection and telehealth consultations, such that it offers patients and doctors the chance to see and upload their previous or current reports or follow-up documents without a physical visit. This can be applicable when you’re looking for telehealth advice or remote consultation. It is also incredibly economical in comparison to the process of in-person consultations, especially for something benign. This is great for confirmations and follow-ups when dealing with any issues regarding previous physical data collection.
Dealing with emergencies
Assessing the patients’ medical summary and overall medical data in front of the doctor before they arrive can be a lifesaving add-on in case of any emergencies. It can also help patients who need urgent prescriptions and dosage changes, and this overall process immensely improves the way in which the healthcare workflow operates with pre-charting.
Seeking second opinions
Seeing a single doctor is just often not enough in several cases. Often, you need to seek another expert opinion. Pre-charting makes it easy for your new doctor to access your previous medical records, so they are easy to compare and available on your hospital’s database. Finally, it produces better workflow and health outcomes, which is the primary goal of all health services.
Wrapping Up
That brings us closer to how pre-charting helps with improved workflow in the provision of care. It is useful in the entire process of diagnoses and doctor-patient communications, as well as in audits and insurance claims. Hence, it is the backbone of any improved healthcare workflow.
