Overlook of patient time log entry errors during emergency department processes

Abstract

Patients visiting emergency departments need appropriate medical care on time from the point of arrival to discharge. Time logs are essential for keeping track of patient status during the visit. The accuracy of time logs is not supposed to be compromised to the speed of data entry. The objective of this study was to investigate how falsely patient time logs were entered during emergency department processes. Data omissions and false entries of time logs were considered to estimate the likelihood of data entry errors. Results showed that omission errors were occurred at the doctor’s examination process and false entry errors at the registration process. The modality change of data entry from keying data to voice activated data entry would be a suggestion to reduce the false time log data entry at emergency department processes.