Week Eight:
Children’s Hospital Colorado Center for Gait Movement and Analysis

August 21, 2015

Things are starting to really pick up here in Aurora! As week eight draws to a close, our final presentations draw closer. For me, this week was mostly spent trying to get through more data clean-up.  While all of our patients have been entered into the database, there is still lots to do.

Like I’ve explained before, we are looking at the use of a template designed for supracondylar fractures. After taking about a month to enter the data available in templates, I thought we were all done! I was very wrong. This week I finished going through those patients whose information was not entered into a template. Essentially, I was reading through the notes made during their visit to see if the information requested in the template had been documented. We had over 725 patients involved in the study. Of all the notes that were used in their care here, about 800 were made without the template. We also have a resident going through those notes, since I can only catch the pretty obvious details, so that helps!

As I was happily plugging along on my no-template list, one of the doctors pointed out a source of potential error in my data entry. You see, when residents (Dr. still in training, fresh out of medical school) make notes in a patient chart they all have to be verified by the attending physician. This is to make sure that residents are doing what they need to be doing. The attending physician can look at the note, make sure it was written properly and that everything that needed to be checked, was checked. The attending physician then approves the note and puts it into the patient’s electronic record. However, in these situations the computer records the author of the note as the attending physician, not the resident. New-to-CHC-Maria did not know this.

I wanted to make sure that authors were being recorded correctly, so after a struggle with the computer I managed to generate the list myself (My boss was gone this week, so generating this list was a bit of a challenge.) I went through all notes that had been attributed to an attending physician, about 800 notes in all. I caught a LOT of records that needed to be changed, which is a bit terrifying! It made me worry that there was some other big error I was missing. But, it seems like that was the only big fluke in my entry so far (fingers crossed!)

Other than that, folks, not much exciting work stuff to report! No shadowing or lectures this week, just data clean-up. Although the clean-up is a tedious process, it is very exciting to see how close we are to being able to put all the pieces together.

However! I did have some exciting out-of-work experiences this week.

Sarah Calhoun ’16 completed her last week of her Dimensions fellowship in Kidney Research, she works just a few buildings down. We celebrated by going to the food trucks that come to the hospital campus every Wednesday (there may or may not have been coffee ice cream afterwards.)

On Friday, I had worked enough hours to be able to get out of the office for a while. Fellow intern Carolyn and I took off early and went hiking in Golden, Colorado. However, after missing the connection back from a loop trail we ended up in a residential area and took an Uber back to our cars…

And because Carolyn and I didn’t wear ourselves out too much hiking we decided to head downtown on Saturday, with another intern, Brian. I have to say, we are not the most suave group of young people in the club. We spent too much time talking about our projects here and Brian’s research on fish mate selection at Denver University to be considered cool… But we had a great time!