Improving Patient Care, Safety and Efficiency with Automated Data Capture
Anyone working in the healthcare industry knows that delivering safe and positive patient care outcomes is the primary mission. But our healthcare providers don’t always have enough time to spend with patients, and care workflows can sometimes be cumbersome and inefficient.
This means less time spent with patients, less satisfaction, and more frustration for everyone involved, and greater risk of potentially dangerous medical errors.
Patients who don’t feel like they’re getting enough time and attention from surgeons and staff are much less likely to return for future procedures or provide good reviews or referrals. Those who are a victim of a medical error or mistake due to mix-ups or a lack of proper tracking are more likely to sue, which means a heavy financial risk for surgery centers.
Surgeons and clinicians who don’t have an automated, accurate and reliable way to identify, track and match the right patients, medications, specimens and surgeries are less productive and more prone to make potentially serious mistakes. And IT is often caught in the middle, trying to figure out how to address these issues and connect people, data and information more effectively.
This is why digitizing and automating healthcare identification and tracking is such a crucial strategy, beginning with automating data capture in ambulatory surgery operations.
By automating data capture to digitize, error-proof and streamline patient care, surgery centers can significantly improve efficiency and time spent with patients while minimizing errors and patient safety risks. Instead of manually identifying and tracking patients, specimens, medications, blood bags, or medical devices, an automated system with the right tools digitizes these processes for better efficiency, accuracy and safety.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how a typical digitized surgery center automates data capture:
At check-in, patients are identified and matched with electronic medical records (EMR) and scheduled surgeries, and they’re fitted with a barcoded patient ID wristband so they can be identified, tracked, and matched with all the correct care, medications, specimens, and medical devices, as they move through the center.
Medications, specimens, blood samples, blood bags, medical devices, and other items related to their care are also labeled and tracked with specialized labels for each application. Using thermal transfer top-coated polypropylene labels have a permanent acrylic adhesive that ensures durable labeling and identification without the adhesive leeching through the blood bag.
Clinicians then use healthcare-grade barcode scanners, enterprise-grade tablets or touch handheld computers to scan labels, identify items, and automatically match them to the correct patient and surgical procedure by transmitting collected data to their EMR or other systems.
This fully digitized and automated approach replaces manual and paper-based processes that are slower, more cumbersome, and prone to error. In the end, it creates safer patient care and maximizes positive surgery outcomes by enabling more accurate identification, matching, and tracking. In turn, this reduces the risks and potential costs of medical errors, and it all happens with better efficiency, so clinicians and surgeons can spend more time with patients and focus more on delivering high-quality care.
To implement an automated data capture solution for your center, it’s always a good idea to work with a managed services and mobility technology provider who is experienced in healthcare and can procure and configure the right solutions for your business needs. The time, resources, and knowledge needed to implement a solution can be daunting for even the most experienced IT teams, so leaning on outside experts is a smart and strategic way to minimize the challenge and expedite a surgery center transformation.
Healthcare technology and managed service experts such as our team at Stratix can guide you through the entire process, recommend the right solutions, and help you with every aspect of optimizing your operations with a complete managed services offering that covers everything from technology and software deployment to training and long-term support.
