The HIM Department maintains 500,000 records and responds to 5,000 requests for records in a given period. What is the record usage rate?

• A. 0.5%
• B. 1%
• C. 5%
• D. 10%

Answer: (B)

Record usage rate shows how much of the record collection is accessed during a given period. You calculate it by dividing the number of requests by the total number of records and turning that into a percentage. Here, 5,000 requests divided by 500,000 records equals 0.01, which is 1 percent. So the usage rate is 1%. This means that about one out of every hundred records was requested in that period. For context, 0.5% would be 2,500 requests, 5% would be 25,000, and 10% would be 50,000, which don’t match the given numbers.