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Topic starter
Hi All,
I'm an office assistant at a family practice clinic. A doc is moving to another practice and needs to take his patient charts with him. Our Centricity support people, HealthCo, wants to charge us $3000 per provider to export the patient charts in bulk. We're a small clinic, and even if we weren't, charing $3000 to export our own information is criminal.
I'm doing this all by hand, and my current process is this: I open the patient chart, click 'Print', then select 'Complete Chart' from the 'Clinical Lists' print topic. I select the Adobe PDF printer, and Centricity prints 3 PDFs to a folder I choose. This includes the Patient Contact Info, all Patient Documents, and the Flowsheet. I have no complaints about this process, other than I have to do it for over 6000 patients. By June.
Someone please tell me there is a way to export the Complete Charts for patients in bulk or batches (as in, more than one patient at a time).
Thanks very much!
Posted : May 9, 2016 12:00 pm
Are you sure you are getting attachments?
Posted : May 9, 2016 12:12 pm
Do you have a programmer who can write a script to automate the process for you?
Posted : May 9, 2016 12:30 pm
Topic starter
Hi SLHV,
External attachments are organized and stored on a separate server for us. Those are easily accessible, so not a problem. I'm only concerned about batch exporting complete charts by patient.
Thanks
Posted : May 9, 2016 12:31 pm
Topic starter
Hi Kwest,
Not on hand. Does GE make available their programming standards anywhere? I might be able to put something together, based on how complicated it ends up being...
Thanks
Posted : May 9, 2016 12:35 pm
No, I do not know their programming standards. It doesn't hurt to give them a call. They gave us a script to run when our users lock a chart.
Posted : May 9, 2016 12:40 pm
Hi,
I can build a program for way cheaper than that, that will allow you to do so. When do you need it by? Let me know if you are interested, I was going to build this anyways for a medical records program to speed up processing. [email protected]
Posted : May 9, 2016 12:52 pm
So you have 6000 signed patient requests to send their records to the new practice? Otherwise this sounds like a HIPAA violation to me.
Steve
Posted : May 10, 2016 1:55 am
I'd second swestfisher's warning...
The info is from 2007 but I believe it's still relevant.
"Since the physical record is considered the property of the practice and the information in the record is considered the property of the patient, a practitioner who is leaving one practice to go to another should not simply take the records with him of those patients who will continue in his or her care."
Posted : May 10, 2016 5:16 am
I believe it is important to note that the data for your clinic is accessible via SQL Server or any tool that uses ODBC connectivity. The data is available to the practice for automating extraction at no charge.
The tool you reference is a software application that very efficiently exports and stores all patient chart data for providers that require ongoing chart availability without Centricity availability such as those that are retiring or migrating software platforms.
The software tool formats the exported data to be identical to how it is displayed in Centricity for familiarity. The records are stored by patient for ease of ongoing access. Additionally, we encrypt the data extract for HIPAA security compliance. We have invested heavily into the simplicity and functionality of this extraction software which requires a fee.
To summarize, our software tool should simplify and expedite the extraction process with a secured final product. If you determine the value of the tool does not support the cost the raw data IS available for access via SQL Server.
Posted : May 10, 2016 6:02 am
That is how we treat it when a provider leaves our practice. We send a letter to each of the patients stating that if they want to continue seeing the provider, they would need to sign a release for transfer of records.
Luckily, we have only every had one doctor leave that stayed in the area that we had to do this for, all of the others moved several states away.
Posted : May 10, 2016 9:12 am
I agree with other people who said that exporting charts without patient consent seems like a HIPAA violation. We have doctors leave our pracice all of the time and all we do is send letters. We wait until either the patient or the doctor at the new practice sends a medical records request for that patient and then we send the records over.
That being said, I have written an application that exports individual charts as well as external attachments. The external attachments get saved in whatever format they were already in and the internal documents get saved as individual RTF files. (meaning charts could potentially have dozens or hundreds of files associated with each chart, but that seems more like his problem, not yours) Send me an email and I can get it to you. I am not sure how much quicker it would be for you as it is not meant to export multiple patient charts quickly. I wrote it to export a single patient chart quickly for subpoenas.
If you would like something to export all of the charts at once, I would be willing to do some modifications to the application for a fee.
Posted : May 12, 2016 9:50 am
Hi,
What did you end up doing? We are faced with the same problem, only slightly different in that we are a single physician practice and are moving to a large clinic with a different EMR. We need to take our charts with us. Our vendor is actually asking for much more than what yours is asking, to convert our charts into pdf files, by patient. It's crazy, and we can't afford it.
Any help would be very much appreciated!
Posted : February 26, 2017 6:10 am
