I was rather alarmed last Tuesday morning to get an email from my Regional Director insisting I attend a meeting that afternoon with her and four other quality control and administrative staff to discuss some problems with my “compliance” data for timely completion of psychological evaluations.

I have 20 working days from the time I first see a client for an evaluation until the report has to be entered into our electronic record system. I do about ten evaluations a month. My compliance rate is typically 90-95% of the evaluations completed within the 20 day time period. Compliance is a big deal for my agency, as our accreditation and licensure are dependent on everyone getting their paperwork done on time. 90-95% is an acceptable rate of completion.

We have electronic scheduling that helps determine paperwork compliance for most appointments. If your note is completed, a little “F” pops up on the appointment on the schedule. Due to reasons that are too tedious to relate, that doesn’t work for psychological evaluation completion. Someone has to keep a spreadsheet that lists the client’s name, date(s) of evaluation, and date of report completion. A quality control staff has to hand calculate the compliance rate. Most importantly, the appointment in the electronic calendar has to be deleted by the keeper of the spreadsheet.

At the meeting I was informed my compliance rate had dropped to 7%. Well, I knew that wasn’t accurate. I asked who was keeping the spreadsheet. None of the five other people knew what I was talking about. I then reminded them that unless the appointments were deleted from my electronic calendar, it would appear that they weren’t completed if they ran a compliance check with the electronic appointment system. I also told them that none of my evaluation appointments had been deleted from the calendar for more than a year, so it would erroneously seem that I hadn’t finished a report since January, 2023. It was at that point that the they suddenly remembered that my “noncompliance” coincided with the departure of a support staff who had apparently been responsible for the spreadsheet and the deletions, and hadn’t told her replacement or anyone else about it when she left. Everyone was quite apologetic about the mix-up.

Dealing with this nonsense took the better part of a day, what with my fuming and gnashing of teeth and doing my homework to figure out what had gone awry. It reminded me yet again of the danger of poorly run statistics.

Do you access your medical records on-line? What work deadlines have you had to contend with? When have you been wrongfully accused?