Nearly 13,000 pages of dialysis records, in one chronology.
Gina Peiffer, RN, BSN, LNC, runs Gina Peiffer Consulting and serves as Secretary of the AALNC New Jersey Chapter. Gina brought Case Nurse a dialysis case, the kind of record she calls “intense” and “weird,” and has asked to try operating room records next: “another tricky type of record like dialysis.”
Gina is a beta participant: she uses Case Nurse free of charge during the beta and shares feedback with us.
“It built a chronology using every piece of detail and I love it!”
The problem with dialysis records
Dialysis care runs three times a week for years, and every session produces the same forms. By hand, Gina estimates a 500-page record set takes four to six hours. The files arrive as zip archives of dozens of PDFs, each one opened and scrolled by hand.
“Dialysis cases have intense records and weird records…”
The first pass was not good enough
Gina did what we ask every beta nurse to do: run a real file and tell us the truth about it. On the first draft of the dialysis case, Gina was confused about how it pulled the data.
“I feel like it grabbed random bits and pieces.”
We reworked how Case Nurse handles long-running chronic care records, including grouping repeated treatment sessions into runs, so the visits that change the clinical picture stand out instead of being buried.
Two weeks later
“SO MUCH BETTER! This format definitely works with dialysis records. I currently do not have any suggestions. It built a chronology using every piece of detail and I love it!”
Gina’s dialysis cases have not required a chronology so far, so she had no finished chronology of her own to set this one against. What she could judge was the level of detail:
“I know for a fact it was more detailed than I would have been for dialysis records.”
Gina also looked at smaller files built the same way:
“It isn’t as overwhelming with the smaller files and Case Nurse did an AMAZING job.”
Why the size did not matter
On the record set of nearly 13,000 pages, Case Nurse extracted more than 70,000 raw findings. Repeated entries were consolidated and routine records cleared before Gina saw them, leaving about 220 grouped items in the draft and a handful of questions that needed Gina’s judgment. The full set finished processing in a few hours.
The review stays with the nurse: reading the chronology, opening any citation to check the page behind it, resolving the open questions, and signing.