Medical chart audits are better than asking health care workers to make an assessment of their own work and report. Chart auditing involves a means of studying performance and can as well be used as a tool for change in medical facilities (Pounder and Holm, 2010). Medical chart audits are also significant in gaining knowledge concerning the population the medical facility serves. Medical audit charts when kept properly can contain important volumes of information. Such pieces of information can be utilized to establish health problems routinely experienced or to determine the relationship between certain factors for example age and particular health issues.
Just by looking at the audit charts, whether on paper or online, can be revealing on how well a hospital records and honestly keeps a track of data. This is an important quality of a medical chart audit which is not similar with the situation where health workers are allowed to give and record their own assessments. In the later method, unfaithful health workers are capable of manipulating the medical data to fit their own interest (Pounder and Holm, 2010).
Medical chart audits has an advantage over health workers assessments and reports since it concentrates on different facets of a system which includes competence, sharing of findings and results, auditing abilities for clinical data, coding concepts, abstraction ability, compliance and quality assurance (Department of Community and Family Medicine, 2005). This implies that the more the patients are in a medical facility; the more there should be chart audits. The chart audit is indeed capable of producing a comprehensive date vital for Medicare evaluation in a medical facility which may not be the case if the assessment is done and reported by the health care workers in medical facilities (MOS Medical Record Reviews, 2010).
Auditing prospectively before submitting the claims to relevant bodies which is usually done by third parties which has ties with the medical facility always helps to evade problems associated with self reporting. Internal chart auditing plus outside chart auditing will definitely produce vital and undistorted pieces of information necessary for the development of a medical facility in terms of service improvement.
MOS Medical Record Reviews ( 2010). Medical Chart Audits - Improve Productivity. Retrieved 10 August, 2012 from http://www.free-press-release.com/news-medical-chart-audits-improve-productivity-1284448096.html
Pounder, D and Holm K. (2010). Is it Time for an Outside Medical Chart Audit? Retrieved 10 August, 2012 from http://www.schencksc.com/Articles-Resources/Articles/Is-it-Time-for-an-Outside-Medical-Chart-Audit-.aspx
