Technical Affiliation
Part of my school load this semester involves a technical affiliation. This is where I go into a hospital HIM (Health Information Management) department and participcate in all the bitch work I will be managing when I graduate. Oh what fun. So far, I have had two sessions and I have filed, assembled medical records and sat for 8 hours watching people analyzing records. To those of you not in the HIM field, you probably have no idea what I’m taking about. Assembly of a medical record, involves organizing the different forms in a medical record in a particular order, dictated by the health care facility, (forms include discharge summaries, consults, operating reports, etc.). After assemebly, there comes coding (coding the diagnosis and procedures codes for billing), abstracting (summarizing the data in the chart), and analysis (analyzing all the records in the chart to make sure they meet all requirements, making sure all doctors have signed, and looking for missing forms).
Anyways, enough technical information. I have new found respect for the employees in an HIM dept. I could not imagine doing analysis 5 days a week, all year long. No way, I’d go crazy. But I guess that’s why I will manage and not actually do the bitch work… 
