warehouse district

BEFORE

AFTER

One of my first projects at my job with Texas Physical Therapy Specialists was to organize the warehouse space we designated to patient files.  My boss knows how I love to tidy things up so she was very excited to get this off her hands!!  The company grew very fast and the clinics ran out of room to store charts in house so we needed room to store them at our central billing office (CBO).

There are some rules when it comes to personal patient files. 1. They have to be kept under lock and key 2. You have to keep all files 7 years past the last visit 3. Pediatric charts (18 and under) have to be kept for 7 years after their 18th birthday.  So you can see how we are in need for extra storage for all 16 clinics!

We contacted out shredding company and had them come out and shred all our files from 2005 and earlier.  I had the fence contractor come out and widen the fence line to give us almost double the area.  We then purchased more shelving that can hold up to 80 file boxes per unit.  Thanks Nate for helping me put these together! It's crucial to have all the clinics use a standard file box because it allows for easy stacking to use maximum space. We added a labeling policy so all the records are labeled alike which makes retrieving files for litigation or returning patients easy breezy!

Once we were all set up, I contacted all the clinic directors and told them to send me their charts.  We organized charts within each year by clinic and labeled the shelves accordingly.  The system makes it easy to retrieve files when patients return or litigation comes up. We got tons of files out of the clinics and have more room to grow!

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