In today's busy healthcare facilities, often patients are discharged before all clinical documentation is available. As an example, histopathology often requires several days for careful staining and formal opinion from an expert, as does dictated documentation that needs to be typed up and signed off.
If a coder starts work on an Event before all the documentation is available, usually the coding effort cannot be completed. The Event now needs to be "parked" which creates double-handling overheads and extra chores for a coder who now has to track a set of incomplete Events.
While Codectomy makes it easy for coders to park or hold Events in their personal Event List, you can also use the special Work Hold queue type to introduce a post-discharge delay before an Event will be offered to a coder.
Work Queues
While managing Codectomy Work Queues is beyond the scope of this post, most users know that Work Queues are a special type of Event List that can be defined in Codectomy's Event List Manager.
All you need to do is define a Work Hold queue type; this tells the system that this Work Queue places a temporary "Hold" on Events until they no longer match the Queue definition.
The attached example shows a typical Work Hold queue for Plastic Surgery whose histopathology results often won't be available until days after admission.
In the Queue definition you can add a limit on Specialty (Plastic Surgery in this example) but to introduce the delay, set a limit on Discharge Date (also known as Event End date) using Run Date as your comparison.
The Run Date is the current date when the Work Queue processor is rebuilding work queues.
To hold the Event for 5 days post discharge: set Discharge Date to On or After Run Date-5 days.
If Discharge Date is 5 May 2021, this limit will be met until 11 May 2021, at which point the Event will fall out of the Hold queue.
And that's all you need to do, apart from positioning (dragging) the Work Hold queue to the position where you want the Hold to occur.
Next time Work queues are rebuilt, Events will be temporarily Held by this Queue for 5 days after discharge, at which point the Events will continue dropping towards their intended Work Queue destination.