Missing prenatal records at a birth center: a communication problem quantified.
OBJECTIVE
To quantify the extent of missing prenatal records at the time of patient presentation to a birth center, to document the age of the information in those records, and to discover how quickly missing records were retrieved.


METHODS
A survey form was completed over a three-month period for each patient presenting for care.


RESULTS
Prenatal records were unavailable 37% of the time at initial presentation. Records were never obtained for 20% of patients. The median age of the prenatal record was 30 days for those records that were immediately available, and the median age was 5 days for those records that were retrieved later. It took a median of 1.4 hours to retrieve a missing re-cord.


CONCLUSIONS
Prenatal records are frequently missing at the point-of-care, and even when records are avail-able or retrieved, the information contained within them is likely to be outdated. Further research is needed to quantify both the clinical and economic impact of this problem.
Miller
Donald W
DW
eNATAL, LLC, Shawnee, KS, USA.
Yeast
John D
JD
Evans
Robin L
RL
D016550:Birthing Centers / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003142:Communication; D003625:Data Collection; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D007615:Kansas; D008499:Medical Records; D009775:Obstetrics and Gynecology Department, Hospital / Q000458:organization & administration*; D011247:Pregnancy; D011295:Prenatal Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D013997:Time Factors