Analysis and Indexing of UW Health Records

At the beginning of the summer, I was hired as a Health Information Specialist at UW Health in their Health Information Management –Document Imaging department. As a new employee I began their six-course training process to understand the programs that are used to commit information into their medical record. I was fortunate to speak with my supervisor and supplement my training with different projects that would comprise my capstone project: analyzing trauma and sterilization documentation and correcting incorrectly indexed documents from UW Health’s new partner, Swedish American Hospital.

The capstone project provided me with the opportunity to familiarize myself with the information management programs that UW Health uses, to reduce errors in workflow, and to make corrections that would impact other UW Health processes, such as accurate registry recording and billing/reimbursement procedures. I was fortunate to regularly ask my supervisor Ryan Ballweg any questions about documentation and programs. Ryan had the unique perspective of originally being hired as an information specialist, working his way up from specialist to analyst to supervisor, and so had a wealth of knowledge about the programs that UW Health uses for document imaging. This project was done independently, and I was given access to the document correction capability in the database program, a capability usually reserved for senior specialists. The tasks were overwhelming in the amount of documentation and also the fact that I had to do them simultaneously to training in the department, but I very much enjoyed the processes and made me feel like I was contributing directly to the UW Health system as a whole.