Jun

24

Tip: Analyze your registration process

By Case Management Weekly

Patients typically arrive at the hospital as planned, urgent, or emergent admissions, and are registered in different ways. Errors made during the registration process can have a negative impact all the way to throughput and discharge planning. For this reason, the hospital may want to consider a performance improvement project to identify if there are registration errors, the types and frequency of these errors, and when they occur. For example, do errors occur more often on emergency admission on the night shift? What types of errors are they? Are they duplicate medical record numbers, errors in Social Security numbers, or the spelling of patient names? Any of these issues will have an impact on patient safety, discharge planning, and even billing or denials.

Editor’s note: This tip comes from HCPro’s newest training resource for hospital case managers—Core Skills for Hospital Case Managers: A Training Toolkit for Effective Outcomes by Beverly Cunningham, MS, RN, and Toni Cesta PhD, RN, FAAN, available now at HCMarketplace.com.