Flub-Free Filing Every Time
Six tips to make sure items are right where they are supposed to be.
Filing correctly is an extremely important task for your office.
Losing or misplacing charts is a big waste of time, and can frustrate your entire team. Consider the six methods below to make filing a little less painful and a lot less stressful.
- Make your environment filing-friendly. "Filing is easiest when you have good lighting and file drawers that are not chock-full of charts," says Nancy Racaniello at the office of Annette Racaniello, DO, in Brookhaven, N.Y.
- Key person. Only one or two staff members should be in charge of filing, says Susan Billock, receptionist at Emergency Medicine Specialists PC in Grand Rapids, Mich. This "lessens the potential for misfiling."
- Buy an alphabetizer. It may sound silly, but remembering your alphabet is the most important step in filing. Buying an alphabetizer — which looks like a large checkbook with the alphabet - can help you sort, says Catherine Brink, CMM, CPC, president of Healthcare Resource Management in Spring Lake, N.J.
- Use "out guides." Out guides are plastic chart fillers that you put in the place of a file you are pulling, says Laurel Robinson, office manager of Maine Urology Associates PA in Bangor. "Then when the filing clerk is filing, he or she can always file to the out guide," she says. It’s also a good idea to place a card in the out guide with the patient’s name, date of birth and who pulled the chart.
- Use pocket folders. Using pocket folders instead of open-ended ones means there’s less of a chance that something will fall out, Billock says.
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