Missing prenatal records at a birth center: a communication problem quantified.
OBJECTIVES: To quantify the extent of missing prenatal records at the time of patient presentation to a birth center, to document the age of the information in those records, and to discover how quickly missing records were retrieved. METHOD: A survey form was completed over a three-month period for each patient presenting for care. RESULTS: Prenatal records were unavailable 37% of the time at initial presentation. Records were never obtained for 20% of patients. The median age of the prenatal record was 30 days for those records that were immediately available, and the median age was 5 days for those records that were retrieved later. It took a median of 1.4 hours to retrieve a missing re-cord. CONCLUSION: Prenatal records are frequently missing at the point-of-care, and even when records are avail-able or retrieved, the information contained within them is likely to be outdated. Further research is needed to quantify both the clinical and economic impact of this problem.