Transitory Health Record

Any document, file, transcript, image or other record in any form/media that:

• has no clinical value or use beyond an immediate and minor transaction;

• is only required for a short time during and not usually after the transaction;

• is made obsolete by an updated version of the record, subsequent transaction or decision;

• is a duplicate or copy of a record elsewhere recording in the clinical or legal record of care;

• is a work-in-progress or non-committed draft record that will have no value once the final record is produced.

Examples include: announcement of the time and place of a patient conference; reminder to see a patient in the emergency room; indication of the location of a patient or intervention; list of patients to be seen by a clinical team; etc.

Transitory records do not document actual patient care, clinical decisions, actions taken, interventions or outcomes. They do not provide unique evidence of health services actions that must be documented for legislative, organizational or professional reasons and have no unique research or archival value to the organization or the healthcare provider.