Journal of

Background and Aim: Development and evaluation of rehabilitation services as a section of health system, which plays an important role in the improvement of the quality of life, needs a mechanism for information management as well as other healthcare levels. The effectiveness of information management has been assured through standardization & ongoing evaluation of rehabilitation centers. There is no standardization on rehabilitation information management processes in Iran, Therefore we surveyed the standards of information management at Commission on Accreditation for Rehabilitation Facilities and compared them to same English & Australian rehabilitation services evaluation & standardization organizations. At the end, we present a framework for necessary standards for this field.

Materials and Methods: In this literature review article CARF standards in axis of information management infrastructural standards, data gathering, content of records, documentation principles, information reveal for confidentiality policies of standard classification has been investigated. We used reliable electronic references in this article.

Discussion and Conclusion: The CARF information management standards are included a standardized outcome-oriented program evaluation & management systems as a fundamental & infrastructural requirement, data gathering standards, internal content of patient records, the framework for complete documentation and maintenance of information confidentiality. Therefore CARF standards in term of information management are the most complete model and have enough details in compare to the others. The results indicate that CARF standards can be a proper model for standardization activities and evaluation rehabilitation centers.

Background and Aim: Annually, large amounts of fees that paid by hospitals will not be reimbursed as deductions by health insurances and takes irreparable financial losses to hospitals. The purpose of this study was to determine the amount of deductions imposed on hospital bills of Tehran University of Medical Sciences and their causes related to documentation.

Materials and Methods: The present research was a cross-sectional and descriptive study performed in year 2009 on educational hospitals of Tehran University of Medical Sciences. All deductions reports related to Medical Services and Social Insurance related to year 2008 was collected from Income Unit of hospitals. The amount of deduction of each hospital was extracted and organized in the form of comparative tables. Data was analysed by descriptive statistics and Excel application. Then, the amount, type and causes of annually deduction of each hospital was determined.

Results: Most deductions imposed on inpatient bills have been related to the tests, appliances, medicine, residency, surgeon commission, and anesthesia and for outpatient bills have been related to visit, tests and medicine which most of them have been created due to documentation deficiencies.

Conclusion: Most of deductions are due to unfamiliarity of care staff with documentation requirements of insurance organizations. Therefore it is necessary to use a multi-aspect mechanism including education of documentation principles to staff, supervision on record control in the Medical Record Unit and establishment of a committee by university for related activities.