3 Steps to Enhance Efficiency in Your Trauma Registry

Trauma registrars play a crucial role in maintaining comprehensive trauma registries, which are vital to improving patient care, conducting research, and meeting regulatory requirements. However, the fundamental duties required to make these initiatives happen can get stymied in even the most advanced trauma centers. Let’s discuss three essential strategies to enhance registrar efficiency and maximize the accuracy and impact of your data.

1. Review and Optimize Registrar Processes

Inefficient workflows form for many reasons. Sometimes, they are a holdover from a different era when they were necessary. Sometimes, they are a chain of workarounds because the original issue wasn’t corrected. Whatever the case, clunky processes tend to get clogged, contributing to many trauma centers being months behind in data abstraction.

A good place to start is reviewing and reconsidering registrar job responsibilities to maximize abstraction time. Eliminate obsolete tasks, like those that involve paperwork and manual entry. Recruit your team in this effort to establish an abstraction formula that predicts the time required for charts of varying complexity and use this data to shape your plan.

Ensure data consistency and accuracy by standardizing data collection and creating a hospital trauma data dictionary. Establish clear protocols for data entry, including fields and coding conventions, and document the guidelines.

2. Take Advantage of Technology

Integrating trauma registry systems with electronic health records (EHR) can automate data capture and reduce manual entry tasks. ImageTrend Patient Registry, for example, is a fully interoperable SaaS solution that seamlessly transfers patient information from the EHR to the trauma registry.

This solution saves time by eliminating duplicate data entry and has the added benefit of reducing transcription errors. Pay attention to advanced functionalities that can help you pre-populate fields, automate data validation, and report to multiple agencies (including burn, trauma, stroke, and more) all at once.

Trauma registry software can do so much more than report data to regulatory agencies. Here’s how to maximize its potential:

• Support informed decision-making and quality control: Choose software that enhances decision making and ensures quality control.
• Leverage robust data analytics and reporting tools: These tools save registrar’s time and unluck valuable insights, enabling performance initiatives, research, and patient care.
• Empower your registry team: Effective tools allow the registry team to focus on chart abstraction, interrater tasks, and other value-adding activities. This transformation of raw data into actionable intelligence leads to better patient outcomes.
• Annual software cleanup for efficiency: Once your system is operational, schedule an annual trauma registry software cleanup. Efficient systems prevent registrars from wasting time on unnecessary scrolling or searching, saving hours and weeks over time.
• Optimize reporting fields: Identify which reporting fields aren’t mandatory for regulatory compliance. Review additional fields to ensure they align with current hospital initiatives. Eliminate fields that are:
  • Redundant
  • Left over from previous studies or quality programs
  • No longer necessary

3. Invest in Your Trauma Registry Team

An ongoing theme is to remove obstacles from your trauma registry team so that they can focus on chart abstraction. A long-term vision can help you identify your goals and what it will realistically take to get there. The solutions will likely be multi-pronged and address several elements of your team’s day-to-day operations.

Start by reviewing your trauma registry team’s responsibilities and tools. Registrars are highly trained and in-demand professionals, but many are still relegated to rudimentary data entry and administrative tasks, including scanning, filing, and making calls. Hiring an assistant or administrator can help the registrar provide more value.

Evaluate the software your registrars use and the additional tasks it creates. Is it outdated or lacking functionality? Are there repetitive transcription tasks that could be automated? Addressing these root causes of inefficiency can make a significant difference.

Finally, present your findings and recommendations to leadership to secure their buy-in for necessary investments. Come prepared with data to demonstrate the benefits of hiring additional staff or updating tools, showing how these changes can improve efficiency and patient outcomes.

Learn how ImageTrend's Patient Registry can help create seamless workflows in our latest webinar.

Ready to transform your trauma registry? Contact ImageTrend to learn how our technology solutions and expert support can help you achieve your trauma registry goals.