Concurrent review vs. retrospective

[RadRobyn]

I am new to Quality Improvement. I've been in my role for 8 months and we are in the process of training and making the switch from retrospective review to concurrent. Approximately 2/3 of our work will become concurrent while the rest (mostly those items that are sampled) will remain retrospective.

Our staff have been divided into concurrent abstractors, retrospective abstractors, performance improvement coordinators, and an educator.

I am interested to hear if anyone has gone through this process and if you have suggestions, ideas, or just comments on this. Because I am new to the department, I am open minded to a new process and my biggest fear is really finding my way around the hospital as my patient list may lead me just about anywhere each day. I am just "going with the flow" r/t the overwhelming amount of information we are learning with all the different databases. However, my coworkers are accustomed to abstracting only one database...for years sometimes and are quite anxious about the amazing amount of knowledge required to abstract for multiple databases (the 'abbreviated' training manual which included dictionaries for the databases was 5 inches thick!).

One of the things that does not make sense to ME is how we will keep up with the case load concurrently...especially important because I am one of the concurrent abstractors and I am salaried. All I know is we will be responsible AS A GROUP to have all the month's cases abstracted by the deadline of the 5th of the following month. That's a little scary!

Thanks for any insight you can share!

P.S. As I said..I'm new and a lot of this is unknown territory, but here some of the databases I know I'll be responsible for are ACC-PCI (or NCDR...not sure how you say this?), STS, and CMS measures for inpatients. There are probably others but this hasn't been solidifed and/or I don't know :)

[hawkindl]

I saw in your post your are responisble for STS. I too am resposnible for STS in my facility as well as NCDR-ICD regestry. I have been doing this for less than a year and am trying to find people from other facilities to be able to contact to bounce questions/ ideas off of. I am doing concurrent abstraction for STS but NCDR/ICD is still retrosepective. How many cases each month do you have to review for STS?