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. 2005:2005:535-9.

Missing prenatal records at a birth center: a communication problem quantified

Donald W Miller Jr  1 , John D Yeast, Robin L Evans
Affiliations

Missing prenatal records at a birth center: a communication problem quantified

Donald W Miller Jr et al. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2005.

Abstract

Objectives: 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.

Method: 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.

Conclusion: 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point-of-care, and even when records are avail-able or retrieved, the information contained within them is likely to be outdated.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.

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