Oh, So That's A Chart Review

The big "Resident's Day" is nearly upon us. We are all required to do some sort of research on an annual basis. This is the day we all get to talk about what we've done. There will be plenty of other people speaking as well - a few attendings with some topics to discuss, the PhD's who have done work, and of course a guest speaker who will give multiple talks.

My research consisted of a chart review. I gathered a list of patients with a common diagnosis and surgical procedure. For each patient, I performed an investigation into the chart to gather several pieces of information from the initial presentation of the problem to its immediate surgical management to long-term follow up of outcomes. The first step was getting the list of correctly identified patients - but that in itself was a challenge.

I spent a good amount of time on my vacation in San Antonio working on this since the list of patients was generated near my departure. Fortunately, I was easily able to do most of the work on a computer by remotely accessing the electronic medical records. But, I had to search out several different documents in the chart to gather the desired information. This was even more difficult when I came back to Little Rock and worked on the charts from ACH, which seemed to have much less usable information in a paper format. But I gathered what I could.

Once the data was all in my hands, it was sent off for analysis. What I got back was a bunch of percentages which failed to reach statistical significance. Yay - no publication from this.